Art of Combat Online
by Yakosh
Summary: Kai Nari is a 13 year old orphan girl with a traumatic past. She lives with her best friend Aki, Aki's older sister, and the latter's wife. She spends her free time playing video games or with swords, so when she and her friend get copies of the new NerveGear and the ACO beta test, they gladly jump in. [Hiatus]
1. Chapter 1

**I haven't written _anything_ in ages, haven't written any _fanfiction_ in longer, and haven't _posted_ anything in even longer. One of my problems is that I'm terrible at plot or anything of the sort, including even a general direction for the story to go, so I decided to write SAO fanfiction again because it has very linear easy direction, at least for the first arc. Up. Seriously. Since everyone is climbing a castle, it's relatively easy to write. I need to come up with material, figure out what to skip and what to write (how many boss fights and side adventures and whatever), and decide what to keep and what to change from the original story, but in the end, there's a clear direction the story goes. Up Aincrad and towards a final boss.**

 **TLDR: I haven't written in a while because plot is hard and SAO is easy to write so I decided to write this.**

 **Also, I'm warning now, there will be some mechanics changes, as well as some general changes that those of you who have read the LNs will probably be able to use to guess something pretty major I won't say yet.**

* * *

 **The way I'm writing this is just for this opening, if you skip over it you won't miss out on too much except a description of the main characters and I just thought it would be a bit funny.**

Our story starts basically like SAO.

(Shows a picture of the SAO characters with Asuna and Kirito in the middle and Klein, Silica, Liz, Leafa, and Sinon around them surrounded by everybody else, all of them in their real bodies. They're standing on the invisible platform that Kirito and Asuna watched Aincrad crumble from. The sky looks the same as then and the castle of Aincrad floats behind them, whole)

Except all the characters less than 20 are like 6-7 years older.

(All the teenagers rapidly turn into young adults)

And the story is really not about them at all...

(The platform zooms off the screen and another one zooms in with two girls. One of them 13 years old with cute face and straight black hair that frames her face and goes down to just above her waist. She is short, going to up to just under the chin of the other girl and is generally petite. The other 15 years old with crimson hair that goes just past her shoulders with bangs that go down in an irregular to a little above her eyes at the lowest point. She stands at a little over 5'4 with a more developed figure)

Well okay, it's actually somewhat about them.

(The original platform moves back onto the screen, moving to behind and to the left of the platform in the middle)

Also, the castle is wider.

(The castle grows about 4 times wider)

There we go.

 **I don't really know why I wrote that, I just felt like it. Which really describes why I write anything at all, actually.**

* * *

"We're finally back in this world!" Nira says excitedly, hugging the older girl who'd appeared with her and lifting her by leaning back, doing a spin. Her avatar is considerably taller than her real body so she almost trips and puts Akari down.

"I see you decided to make yourself taller again," Akari teases.

"Of course!" Nira says with a smile.

"During the 2 months of beta testing that led to you tripping who-knows how many times in both worlds," Akari points out.

"Worth it," Nira says, still smiling.

"If you say so. I guess it doesn't take long to adjust."

Nira runs her hands through her avatar's short light blue hair that goes down to her shoulders.

"Let's get moving? We wouldn't want to fall behind," Akari says.

The two use their starting money to buy their basic weapons. For Nari, this means dual longswords (something many had tried to copy during the beta, and most had failed completely, and even of those who succeeded to do anything, for most of them it was ineffective), though she preferred a different type of sword, they weren't available as starter weapons. For Akari this meant a bow and dagger.

They then run off, out of the aptly named [Town of Beginnings] and into the grass fields surrounding it where the [Blueskin Boars], the weakest enemy in the game, dwelled.

A crucial thing to know about the game to know is that any enemy can kill you if you let it, even a high level player against the boars. There is no face tanking damage. Shield tanking yes, face tanking no. If something hits your neck, you will generally die, practically regardless of its level. If you get stabbed through the heart, even with a weak sword, you will die unless healed with a fast-acting healing item almost immediately. In general, some wounds will basically instantly kill you and any would will immediately deal damage depending on the weapon, however afterwards your wounds will 'bleed', which means that the red polygons will float out and your HP will slowly, or not so slowly, depending on the wound, drain.

A nice thing to know to be a good player is that this applies to monsters just as much as players, with a few exceptions. If you stab or cut through the boar's neck, you don't need sword skills to deal serious damage. Most people don't realize this. They hack away at the monster as if this game is a normal RPG and don't consider that it's actually closer to how the real world works than it is to that.

And since they could slaughter the boars easily, they decided to be nice to the 9000 new players and run out to the outer fields where the boars were somewhat higher level and rewarded better loot. Or rather more loot, since it was the same stuff. XP, col, [Boar Hide], and [Raw Boar Meat]. The latter two they planned to sell since neither planned to leatherwork or cook at the moment.

Two boars charge at Nira, who leaps into the air and spins around a horizontal axis, one sword following closely after the other. The first chops into the neck of one boar, the second hitting just as it leaves and cleaving the rest of the way through. The wound made is a flat red with white mesh. Red polygons float from the wound in massive amounts for a moment before the whole boar vibrates and shatters into blue polygons with a sound like glass shattering.

Nira plants her foot on the other boar's face, kicking off horizontally, slowing its charge and pushing herself away into a roll.

She charges next to the boar, running by it with her right side to it and activating the sword skill [Horizontal] to grant her strike enough power to cut through the boar's skull and kill it from the front. Inefficient in general because sword skills tire you but more efficient in the particular situation than dancing around it and striking from behind.

* * *

Several hours later, the two lay tiredly on the grass watching the setting sun. Despite being exhausted they both had huge smiles on their faces.

"You wanna rest a bit and then get back to it? Sis gave us permission to play until 10 today, so we've only used half our time. Or do you wanna take a break and get a snack to eat?" Akari asks.

"Let's have a snack."

"Okay. Let's logout then?"

A few seconds later, Nira says, "Akari... is there no logout button for you too?"

Akari nods.

"Hmm... maybe it's a bug? No they would have noticed by now since everyone would have called the GMs and just force logged everyone out until it was fixed. Then what? Maybe just a bug for the two of us?" Nira wonders aloud.

"That wouldn't make much sense. I'm gonna try calling a GM," Akari says.

A moment later. "It's busy. We're probably not the only ones."

"This makes sense. There's no way this would have made it past testing. They would have noticed no logout button, even if it's just on non-GM menus. Which means that... that what? It was deliberate? Maybe this is some sort of opening event? It would be _terrible_ PR, since everyone with anything important they planned to get to would be furious," Nira mutters.

"Let's try waiting a little and seeing if anything happens. Maybe somebody felt it would be funny to edit it last minute and managed to make it so that none of the logout features work and they're working on fixing it. There'll probably be an announcement soon or something," Akari suggests.

"I don't think there would be anyone able to edit it like that last minute without anyone knowing except... Kayaba Akihiko. He basically made the whole the game I think, aside from... I don't actually know, bug testing maybe? He'd be able to do whatever and nobody would be able to stop him or even know," Nira says.

"You think Kayaba Akihiko did this?" Akari says.

"I think he _could_ do it and that I can't think of any other way," Nira says.

"So yes?"

"Pretty much. But I'm willing to believe I'm missing something. I hope I am," Nira says.

Nira hugs Akari, pressing her face into Akari's chest and muttering, "I'm scared."

Akari strokes her head and says, "It's probably nothing anyway and it'll be fixed soon."

"You know I can't believe that," Nira mumbles.

"We'll be fine. Besides, even if we are trapped here, sis will just take the NerveGears off our heads when she gets home," Akari points.

"If it was him, he'd think of that. The whole thing interfaces with our brains. Wirelessly or not, there's no guarantee it can't kill us. Or rather, I'm fairly certain it could in several ways. It could be set to kill the person if someone tries to take it off," Nira says.

Akari was somewhat worried herself now. Nira was making a disturbing amount of sense, except... "Why would he do that?"

"Who knows. God complex? Wants to have the lives of 10000 people in his hands. Or just... I don't know... wants people to populate the world he created. Maybe he just wants to watch people suffer," Nira says.

While he seemed like a fairly normal, though brilliant genius person, she wouldn't put it beyond him to have a god complex or something.

Nira looks up, a slightly terrified than before look in her eyes and says in a voice that suggested she was quoting Kayaba, "ACO maybe a game, but it's not something you play."

Akari was getting seriously worried now.

In the distance a bell rings. Not really in the distance. It came from the direction of the bell in the center of the [Town of Beginnings], however the real physics of sound drop-off ( _10*_ _log_ **(base 2)** _(1/r^2)_ if you're measuring in decibels) would mean that if it was the loud volume it was here then it would be skull smashing loud at the town. It was actually playing the sound as if the bell was considerably closer.

Regardless a few seconds later, they are teleported to the center of the city where all the other 9999 people appear in one enormous plaza.

"An announcement of some sort..." Akari says.

Red, stretched hexagons appear in the sky making a dome out of 'System announcement' and 'warning' hexagons. The dome seals everyone inside the plaza. In the middle, a blood-like substance flows through the cracks, pooling the air and forming into a red robe with nothing but artificial blackness inside.

 **"Greetings players of Art of Combat Online, and welcome, to my world,"** the figure says in a booming voices.

"Kayaba Akihiko..." Nira mutters clinging onto Akari, her heart rate and breathing accelerating.

"Please be wrong," Akari mutters to herself, referring to Nira's 'predictions'.

 **"My name is Kayaba Akihiko. As I'm sure some of you have already noticed, the logout button is missing from your menus. I assure, this is not a bug."** ("It's not a bug, it's a feature.")

"No..." Akari mutters.

 **"I repeat, this is not a bug, but rather an intended feature of the game. You cannot logout in anyway. If someone attempts to remove the NerveGear from your head, the microwave transmitter in the NerveGear will fry your brain, killing you immediately."**

"No... please no... this can't be happening," Nira mutters.

 **"Regrettably, some friends and family have ignored this warning and attempted to remove the NerveGear regardless. As a result, we currently have 231 less people than we started with. Every major news company in the world is reporting on this at the moment, so it is safe to assume that the chances NerveGears being removed are minimal."** Around the figure news feeds appears on screens.

"231 people dead... 231. Dead. No chance to fight, just dead because they wanted to play a game and their family didn't listen to the warning..." Nira mutters her whole body trembling. She was crying. Her breathing speeding up.

Akari tries to remain as calm as she can as she holds Nira to her chest and strokes her. "Calm down. Take deep breaths," she says and breaths deeply. She wasn't sure if it was possible to suffocate without water or being choked in this game but she didn't want to find out.

Slowly Nira's breathing levels out.

 **"At this point, the only way out is to clear the game."** A hologram of Aincrad appears, a red path winding up the floors through the dungeon towers of sky connecting the floors. **"Right now you are on the first floor. Defeat the boss at the top of the first floor dungeon and you will progress to the next floor. Once you defeat the 100th boss on the top floor, you will clear the game and all remaining players will be logged out."**

"Remaining..." Nira mutters.

Akari realizes what she meant. That meant there would be players that wouldn't make it.

 **"There will be no respawns and no revival items of any kind. Once your HP reaches 0 and your avatar dies, the microwave transmitter in the NerveGear will fry your brain."**

"Those people... all the people new to game who died to boars," Nira was close to vomiting, though some part of her mind wasn't even sure if it was possible to vomit in ACO.

 **"The pain dampener will be set down, things will be close to as painful as they would be in the other world."**

Nira and Akari both remember the various times they got hit during the beta by even the most basic enemies like boars and how painful that would be in real life.

 **"Last but not least, I have placed a little present in your inventory. Please, take a look."**

Everyone looks in their inventory and immediately finds a mirror. Nira is momentarily distracted from her near panic attack by her curiosity. She looks at it before she is surrounded in a bright light which stops her from seeing Akari or even her own hands. When it clears she glances in the mirror once more and sees her own face.

She turns to Akari and finds that she was to look up to look at her face, since she had been reverted to her real height.

"Our real bodies... how?"

"I don't know... calibration wouldn't have this sort of detail... and it can only see our face. Even the scar on my hand is there. Our self-image? That shouldn't be possible, unless Kayaba lied not only about what the NerveGear can do, but also the fundamental principles of how it works."

 **"This is your world now."**

Panic breaks out.

 **"Some of you are probably wondering 'why'. Why would I do this. My goal was simple. To control the fate of a world of my own design. As you can see, I have achieved that goal. This marks the end of the tutorial and the official start of ACO. Players, I wish you the best of luck."**

The figure turns into red mist and the red dome vanishes.

"No... sis... Hina..." Nira was crying into Akari chest, her moment of curiosity overriding fear over.

"Nira," Akari says, using 'Nira's' real name, "We'll get out of this, I promise. We'll get back to the real world. We'll see sis and Hira again. We'll survive."

"But we should move, get a decent room before they're all bought out so we can figure out how to act."

Nira nods, straightening and wiping her eyes, putting on a brave front.

* * *

10 minutes later the two are in a small room in a hotel with a single comfortable bed. With the price of the room, they could stay there for a month without doing anything except leaving to get food. Plenty of time to figure out what to do.

At the moment, the two were curled up together on the bed, clinging to each other for comfort. Their strength sapped completely allowing them to go to bed at 5:45.

"We'll make it out of this. We have to."

Nira nods into Akari, the face still wet with tears.

* * *

'Sis' (actually named Sari) and her wife Hina were sitting together in a restaurant. They'd left Sari's younger sister and her best friend—the orphan Nari who'd been living with them for 7 years since her parents were murdered in front of her—to play their game, ACO, and went on a date.

They were ready to order and waiting for the waitress. Sari heard some people sitting near them talking.

"Have you seen the news?"

"No, what?"

"Kayaba turned out to be a madman."

The name seemed familiar to her. Very.

"How so?"

"ACO and that NerveGear turned out to be some sort of death trap."

Sari turns deathly still. While she hadn't immediately recognized the name Kayaba, both NerveGear and ACO were words she'd heard way too many times over the past week from Aki and Nari.

Clearly Hina had also been listening since she drops her menu.

"The people are all trapped. If you try to remove someone's NerveGear it kills them and the only way for them to get out is to beat the game. And it also kills them if they die in the game, according to Kayaba. And the government has had no luck hacking into the game. A couple hundred people already died from having their NerveGears removed."

"Wow. I almost bought that. I'm glad there was a long line that I didn't stand in," the other person says.

Both Sari and Hina practically jump up, almost toppling the chairs and gathering a considerable amount of attention, not that they cared in the slightest.

They run back to their car and drive home as fast as they can, both thinking thoughts along the lines of, 'Please no please no please no'.

They spend a while fumbling with the lock on the door to their apartment before finally getting in and running straight to Aki and Nari's shared room.

"No... why..." Sari mutters, starting to cry.

She turns and hugs Hina, who hugs her back, both of them crying in each others arms before they turn on the news to find out as much as they can and what they should do.

"They'll make it out. They're great at video games," Hina says as reassuringly as she can, chuckling sadly.

* * *

 **A version of episode 1 with slightly more girls crying and hugging each other.**

 **Please tell me what you thought, any reviews are appreciated. Also please follow and (if you like it) favorite.**

 **Next to chapter hopefully soon and possibly never (though I generally do make it to chapter 2 or 3).**


	2. Chapter 2

**I made a small change to the last chapter (Jan 16 2017), basically adding Kayaba telling the players that the pain dampener had been set down, changed the way damage works somewhat, and made it so that the above floors of the castle can't be seen.**

 **Anyone confused, "Kai Nari" (family name comes before given name in Japan) is the character's real name and "Nira" is the avatar name.**

* * *

The days went by blandly. Just sitting there, occasionally going down to the cafe on the bottom floor of the inn to eat. A week passed by. Then two. Then another and it was clear they weren't getting out anytime soon and that nobody from the outside was helping them.

Nira mutters, "I feel like we should be doing something but... I'm scared. I don't want to die. I don't want you to die."

"I don't want either of us to die either," Akari says. She was coping much better than Nira.

"In the beta we were practically the strongest players, it feels... wrong not to do anything when we could. Just the two of us... we could probably have found the boss by now. Or at least mapped a significant portion of the [Dungeon], but..."

Nira leans on Akari where they sat next to each other and finishes, "One mistake and we could die..."

"We're going to need to go out and do something to get some more col soon. And I honestly can't stand this food any longer."

"But..."

"You don't have to go."

Nira shakes her head. "I'd rather go than sit here while you put yourself in danger!" she says.

"Nari..."

"It's okay. I shouldn't be such a scaredy cat."

"It's alright to be scared, we went from playing a game to fighting monsters that can kill us. You don't have to go either, I can just go kill some boars or do some easy quests and it'll be fine."

"I'll come. Aside from the whole being terrified thing," she chuckles a little, "I actually want to go out. I feel like I'm rotting, just sitting here and not doing anything. At least we should walk around the [Town of Beginnings] some more, we haven't really explored it."

* * *

After a few hours of exploration—they decided putting off getting money for a few hours wouldn't be an issue—Nira says, "Somehow I feel much better now... like this isn't so different from the ACO where nothing could touch us..."

"Well, mechanically, the only difference is the pain dampener is lowered. In the beta we hadn't died a single time in the second month. We'll be fine against some weak monsters."

Nira takes a deep breath.

"Okay, let's go."

A few minutes later they had left the safety of the [Safe Zone] of the [Town of Beginnings] and head out into the plains surrounding the city. Akari shoots the boars they pass by before they can even come close.

The [Town of Beginnings] was a circular city tangent to the southern most point on the first floor of the castle.

And they were currently heading north, towards the [Dungeon] and most of the rest of the floor.

Nira smiles and twirls on the grass, falling onto her back and lying, looking at the sky above them, despite from the outside there being a ceiling above them.

"If you close your eyes you can forget that this isn't the real world... the grass feels so real. Everything feels so real. Tastes real. Smells real. Sounds real. Looks real, in some sense."

"Yeah, really doesn't feel like a game supposedly built out of polygons," Akari agrees.

"Are you scared?" Nira asks.

"Very."

"You're strong."

"More like too scared to show how scared I am," Akari says and extends a hand towards Nira, who grabs it and gets up.

"Fighting seemed so much scarier somehow from that room than actually doing it," Nira says.

"We should go to one of the other towns..." Akari says.

"Why?" Nira asks.

"If we want to fight we're going to need better gear. The enemies around the [Town of Beginnings] are all weak and their drops are terrible. So is the stuff sold."

"Okay. We have plenty of healing potions, right?" Nira says.

"Yeah."

"Then we should go before it gets to night. We should be able to make it to the next town before night, if the map is right."

"Which it probably is."

The two start heading towards the nearest town. A small settlement called [Sorunoka] where they plan to stay the night and hopefully buy better weapons.

Their path goes mostly through a forest and they encounter wolves along their path. On later floors forests like this would likely have goblins, but aside from dungeons and the like, there are no humanoid enemies on the first floor.

The final wolf in a pack jumps at Nira faster than she can fully react and she is forced to take its bite with her arm. It bites on her forearm and she lets out slight scream and drops her left sword before ramming her right sword hilt-deep into, or rather, through, the side of the wolf's head, causing it to vibrate, though it was only a visual effect, and shatter.

She drops her right sword and clutches her arm muttering, "Fuck fuck fuck fuck ow ow ow fuck," and the like. Her HP was dropping at a slow rate where the wound would heal on its own before it killed her.

Akari hurriedly hands her a healing potion which gulps down quickly and the wound closes and she takes a deep breath.

"Hurting almost like in the real world didn't really sink in... that's incredibly painful," Nira says and picks up her swords.

"I can still feel that a bit," Nira adds.

And that realization sapped some of their will to fight, though both of them had considered the thought of, "if it hurts to get hit, then just don't get hit," however they were fairly certain that there were situations where that wasn't an option.

"I remember how I was the first death against the first boss because we tried to kill it with just the two of us," Nira says.

"I remember too. That was fun. We got pretty far before we died."

"If there hadn't been a raid party made planning with the info we got, we might tried again and succeeded," Nira says.

"Maybe. Maybe we would have just died again," Akari says.

"Still, makes me want to skip out on the first boss... I think we might have been the only deaths," Nira says.

"You know that was because we tried to kill it with just us."

"But the only reason nobody else died was because we pretty much figured out its patterns, so when the phase 2 came everyone was healthy and we were able to kill it before it killed anyone in its berserk mode," Nira points.

"We're too low level to fight the boss anyway since 3 weeks behind," Akari says.

"That's true. As low level players, we may be able to kill normal enemies anyway, but we won't do much to a boss without taking extreme risks," Nira agrees.

"We need to level up. Technically speaking, possibly with the exception of some special spots, the best place to level up would be the [Dungeon], however it's also the most dangerous spot," Akari says.

"Hopefully we can get some better armor by the time we get there," Nira says.

"What's with the sudden change of heart? You went from scared to determined," Akari asks.

"I was really pathetic, wasn't I? Anyway, we're practically the most knowledgable and skilled players in the entire 10k people playing or... or however many are still left... either way, it feels like I- we have a duty to fight," Nira says.

"We don't owe anybody anything, we're trapped just like they are and it's not like we're the reason people are trapped," Akari points out.

"We're the ones who _can_ fight," Nira says.

"That doesn't mean we _have_ to fight. There are others who can fight, and I'm sure most of them would say that children like us shouldn't fight."

"Aki..."

"I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying we don't _have_ to. I honestly do want to fight. I just... I don't... I don't want to lose you!" Akari almost yells at the end, tears appearing in the corners of her eyes.

Nira hugs her and says, "I don't want to lose you either. I love you, you're like my sister and I don't know what I'd do without you."

"It hurts to just think about you dying," Akari says, her mask of calm that she'd worn for the past 3 weeks for the sake of Nira crumbling and tears running down her face.

Nira hugs her and says, "I don't want me to die either. I don't you to die either. I don't want anyone to die, but especially not you or me. And I don't plan on dying."

* * *

A few minutes later Akari says, "We really are pathetic... just taking turns crying into each other." She chuckles.

"I'm better now."

"I'm okay too."

"Then we should get going before night comes and we get swarmed by hungry predators," Akari says.

"So we're going to fight?"

"Maybe not go to boss fights for now. At least not this one since we'd be horribly low leveled. But aside from that, yes."

"So tomorrow we start moving towards the [Dungeon]," Nira says.

"Alright."

* * *

By the time they reached the town, night had fallen and they'd been forced to fight a couple wolves empowered by the moon.

But they made it, safe and sound, found an inn, got a room, and fell asleep.

When dawn came, the two bought armor, warm cloaks, and better weapons and head out towards the [Dungeon], which was fairly close to the northern side of the first floor.

At their current pace, it would take basically a day of walking to cross the 30-ish remaining kilometers. Well, with how the game functions, even at this low level, with enough willpower you could probably do it in an hour.

Which meant it would take Akari and Nira, both skilled at using the game's systems around 4 hours at a leisurely pace of 8 or so kilometers per hour (leisurely in SAO where you are superhuman, of course, in real life that's practically running. Not very fast, but running). Of course, if you take into account enemies they may encounter and the like, it would probably be closer to 5 or 6.

They were actually heading not to the [Dungeon] but a town near it where one could do a quest to get a pretty good sword. With two of them, they could get two swords for Nira and it would be a pretty large upgrade in power.

The monsters along their path, which doesn't lead through any dungeons or special areas, would be mostly wolves of various types along with some plant creatures called [Little Nepents].

As they set out in early morning Nira shivers and wraps her boring brown cloak (basically the only kind of warm clothes available here) tighter around herself. "It really is cold. I can't wait till we get clothes made of better materials which are much warmer."

Akari nods. "Yeah. But since we'll be moving we should warm up, and as the sun comes out it should get warmer."

"Would be nice to find some of those magic trinkets that make it so that it never feels cold," Nira mutters.

"Maybe sometime soon. Still... he just had to trap us in the beginning of winter to maximize the amount of time it's cold if we don't get out on some integer number of years..." Akari says and flinches, realizing that they weren't getting out any time soon if they kept going at this rate.

"I was looking forward to Christmas and New Year's with sis and Hina..." Nira says sadly before wiping her eyes. Since Christmas was about a month away and they hadn't done a single floor in 3 weeks, the chances of them beating 3 floors a day and making it out before Christmas were laughably low.

"Even if we manage to move at the beta rate of 5-8 days per floor all the way to the 100th floor, we still wouldn't make it out before next Christmas... possibly not even the one after that," Nira mutters.

Nira clings to Akari suddenly and mutters, "We're gonna be here for years!"

Akari hugs her, "At least we still have each other."

Nira nods.

"Let's go. If we start despair now, we'll never make it out," Akari says, rubbing Nira's back.

Nira lets go of Akari and wipes the tears out of her eyes.

"Okay, let's go. I'm sorry about crying so much," Nira says.

"It's alright. Most people don't have to and haven't had to deal with stuff like this at 13," Akari says and adds in her head, _Or really any of what you've gone through._

"Neither do they at 15," Nira points out.

"Being older means you're more mentally stable by default... or something like that. The field of psychology is a load bullshit with an information half-life of less than a decade," Akari says, earning a chuckle from Nira.

"As opposed to something like physics or mathematics, which have information half-lives of tens of thousands of years, if not more, which is considerably longer than the fields have existed. Which makes perfect sense, since nowhere near half the information about physics or math has been shown to be wrong, unlike psychology where they change their mind about everything every few years," Akari adds.

"I already knew that," Nira comments.

"I know, but sometimes you just feel like saying something," Akari says as they speed up to a jog.

* * *

As they arrive at [Horunka] (I'm aware [Horunka] wasn't actually the town closest to the [Dungeon] in the canon) they see a considerable amount of people there, which was reasonable, since most of the people actively trying to clear the game would be around her. Clearly not too many, but still hundreds. Unsurprisingly, no children, or really anyone under 17 or so. Aside from them, that is. So they get a few surprised looks.

"I wanna sit down," Akari says.

"We did basically run for 4 hours straight," Nira points out and then adds, "I'm hungry."

"If we find a restaurant, we both get what we want," Akari says and smiles.

They find a small NPC-run establishment—technically there are no player-run ones yet—and sit down.

They order some toast from the surprisingly intelligent NPC waitress and wait. Not the particular instance was surprising and at this point it didn't surprise them at all, but in general, the intelligence of the NPCs was surprising. At the same time, they had some bounds. They didn't _understand_. They didn't question who these people were, they didn't question why they appeared out of thin air and why they're all so determined to fight the 'guardians'. Or why the players have menus and the NPCs don't. They didn't contemplate the meaning of life, because to them it was clear, to the waitress, the meaning of her life was to a waitress and to the cook it was to cook and for the guard it was to guard. The quest giver who gave a quest which could be done by multiple people but at most once per person didn't question why they could give the same family heirloom to multiple as a reward for the same problem which comes back after fixed.

That sort of thing aside, they could be conversed with. Much more human than any chatbots. They had their own conversations with each other which weren't scripted but just came up randomly. When the woodcutter from his forest shack came to the diner and chatted with waitress. They wouldn't question about the nature of players, but the waitress did ask them why two children were alone (though she didn't deny service or anything, it was designed as a game and was supposed to playable by a teenager on their own). They also ignored it when someone called them 'NPCs' or mentioned a game or in the beta 'logging out' or anything else of the sort.

"It gets me a bit every time. Within what they're supposed to do, they're so human, but they seem unable to _comprehend_ acting differently. I wonder if it's something that showed up naturally and he was unable to fix or a deliberate restriction, so while they are intelligent, they continue to play the role of NPCs," Akari wonders.

"If we get a chance to talk to Kayaba at the end of the game, we should ask him," Nira chuckles, "Along with any number of other things."

"Your order," the waitress says, bringing two plates and two glasses of water on a tray.

"Thank you," Akari says with a smile and a nod.

The waitress smiles back at them and asks, "Would you like to order anything else?"

"No thank you, we're okay for now," Nira says.

The waitress nods and walks off.

And very quickly they realize that they're going to need to order more, and they do.

"You two sure are hungry," the waitress comments in a humorous tone the third time they order more.

"We've doing a whole lot of traveling and not a lot of eating," Nira answers in a similar tone.

"Where from?" the waitress asks.

"Left the [Town of Beginnings] yesterday afternoon, evening even. Haven't actually eaten anything since, I think," Nira answers.

"That's pretty fast? Where are you going?" she asks.

"Towards the [Dungeon]," Akari answers.

"To fight the Guardian?"

"Find, mostly, we're not strong enough to fight it, but yes," Nira answers. During the beta, they learned that NPCs refer to the floor bosses as 'Guardians'.

"Why are you, and the rest of the [Adventurers], so determined to fight it? To get to the next floor?" the waitress asks.

"We... have our reasons, it would take a long time to explain," Nira answers. The NPC would be unable to comprehend it and if she _could_ there would be no reason to give her an existential crises and tell her that she would probably be wiped from existence once they reached the top. Actually ACO probably wouldn't be just thrown away, given the highly advanced technology.

"All the same reasons?" the waitress wonders, a reasonable question.

"Yes," Nira answers.

"Must be pretty important if such a large group all share the same goal," the waitress comments, making Akari briefly wonder how many NPCs were on the first floor and realize it was probably not 10k.

"We need to reach the top to get home," Nira says, deciding to phrase it in a way that she would get.

"Your home is at the top?"

"No, but we'll be sent back home if we can reach the top."

"The same way you got here?"

"Approximately."

"Did someone force you here?"

"More like tricked. We expected to be able to come and go between here and where we come from freely," Nira answers.

"You come from outside Aincrad?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"You wouldn't know of it."

"That's probably true. We don't have much knowledge of what goes on below. What's your home like?"

"It's nice. We have buildings that reach into the sky made out of glass and metal called skyscrapers and cars, which are like metal carriages that move really really fast and don't need horses. Lots of other interesting things."

"That sounds amazing..." the waitress says slightly wistfully, probably imagining it.

The waitress instead of pressing further, like asking why they came here then, perhaps some side program detecting she was getting close to things that she couldn't know, like literally incapable of knowing, says, "I'm should hurry back to work. It was nice chatting with you. I wish you the best of luck getting home."

"Thank you."

* * *

 **Well, the concludes chapter 2, and since I'm still aching to write, I guess that's a good sign for this story.**

 **Please do tell me what you thought in a review and follow and favorite.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Still feeling like writing this, which is rare. It's kinda like the first story I wrote... How on earth I managed to keep up an average of 3.5k words per day for a month and a half for my first story is beyond me. Regardless of how bad it is, that doesn't change how much that is. One time, I wrote a 2.5k word chapter for something in an hour... that's like, the speed people normally** ** _type_** **, not** ** _write_** **at. The difference being having to think** ** _what_** **to write (writing) or not (typing).**

 **Either way, enyoy chapter 3, all 3 of you.**

 **Also, I changed my mind about the whole '100k players' thing, so I went back and changed it. Kept the larger Aincrad though.**

 **I checked and it turns out there is no same-sex marriage in Japan, but we're just going to say that in 2020 it is (I know SAO starts on 2022).**

* * *

Their next goal was the quest for the [Anneal Blade]. Given the way the quest worked (it could be completed once per person), with two of them and Akari not needing one, it was possible for Nira to have two, which felt kind of like cheating, using two of the same non-repeatable quest reward, however that was all beta concerns, and with no respawning or logging out, Nira couldn't care less about 'cheating'. It _was_ how the game was designed so it wasn't even actually cheating.

The quest required getting a [Nepent Flower] (per person, though most quests were per party). Which meant fighting the [Little Nepents] in the forest. They were a nasty bunch if you didn't know how to fight them, since they had roots with which they would lash out, which allowed them long range, rapid, and fairly powerful attacks which knock you around. Long range weapons are fairly effective, since they had a relatively easy to hit weak point where their 'head' connects to their body. With a sword, the soft plant material can be cut with a single swipe but you need to get close and with most long range weapons it only takes a few hits.

If you were fast or a good shot, they were hardly a threat, and at least one of those applied to both Nira and Akari. Before Akari switched to using mostly a bow with dagger as backup in the beta, she used a dual daggers as her primary weapon. During that time Nira and Akari both used throwing knives considerably because not having any long range damage potential in a party was a pretty bad idea. And once throwing knives became available on the later floors (or when a smith makes them), Nira planned to get them again, just in case, much like how Akari still carried her dagger. That aside, technically that meant _both_ things applied to both of them, though Nira didn't actually have a ranged weapon so it didn't really count.

"The amount of [Little Nepents] has decreased drastically... maybe someone cut a fruit?" Akari wonders. One other nasty thing about them was that some of them had fruits on their head. If you destroy the fruit, it releases a nasty smell which attracts all the others around.

As if to confirm her theory, they see a [Little Nepent] heading somewhere, ignoring them.

Nira leaps forward and decapitates it before the two take off at a run in the direction it was heading. The fact that they were under leveled for the area and they were heading towards great danger unnoticed by them.

It only took them a couple of minutes to see a large crowd of the monsters in a circle, all facing inwards.

While Nira continues to charge forward, Akari skids to a stop, drawing and notching her first arrow before even fully stopping.

She looses it at one of the farther monsters, since the nearer ones would be easier targets for Nira and at this range it didn't make much difference for her.

As Nira cuts down two [Little Nepents] one after the other, a few turn towards her.

The first few attacks from the nepents, whip lashes and jabs with their roots, Nira dodged by rolling and jumping and ducking, however the attacks only increased in intensity as more of the monsters turned towards her. She twirls with her swords, mostly knocking aside instead of cutting the roots which were way too hard compared to their flexibility.

She sheathes her left sword and grabs a jabbing root as it starts to go back, letting the almost unfairly strength of the nepent pull her back towards it and defending from the attacks with her other sword, trying to deflect or cut them rather than block, since any blow capable of throwing her will be tough to block.

With one final yank on the root, she flies past the nepents defenses and cuts off its head, before jumping to the next one in the tightly packed bunch and killing it before the other even finished shattering.

She jumps away from the nepents and into the middle of their circle and next the person who was there. A red head rapier wielder around 20.

"Why are you out here alone?" she asks, standing back-to-back with the rapier wielder.

"Why is a kid out here at all?"

"Age doesn't make much of a difference. I'm clearly stronger than you. And to get the [Anneal Blade]."

"Just aim for the neck thing, run that through with your rapier and it should die in a single hit," Nira says.

"Someone already told me that before," the woman says.

"And where are they now?" Nira asks, assuming they weren't dead by the tone of voice.

"Back in town getting his swords upgraded. I went out to get some XP."

"And he didn't warn you not to cut the fruit?" Nira asks in slight exasperation.

"It was an accident."

"It's on the top of their fucking head! How do you even cut it accidentally?"

The woman starts to answer but Nira cuts her off and says, "Never mind, I don't want to know."

"Do we need to fight them?"

"No, you could run. I'm probably going to stay until we can get two flowers."

"We?" she asks.

"My friend and I."

"Then I guess I'll help you, since I owe you now."

"Or you can just go so I don't have worry about you," Nira suggests.

"I can handle myself fine! While your help is appreciated, it isn't strictly needed. I'm Asuna, by the way," the woman says.

"Well _Asuna_ , your HP says otherwise," Nira comments and tosses a healing potion over her head to Asuna, who catches and drinks it.

"I actually didn't notice that," she says sheepishly.

"Rule #1 of a game where dying means you actually fucking die: pay attention to your fucking HP, you dumbass," Nira says.

"You're a lot more vulgar than someone would guess from looking at you," Asuna.

"And you're a lot stupider than someone would guess from looking at you," Nira says and parries off a root.

For some reason the nepents weren't coming closer and at this distance they weren't much of a threat. It was odd.

"Do you know why they aren't coming closer?" Nira asks. It wasn't a mechanic she remembered. Maybe they were granted some intelligence and decided that if they got closer, they would have lots of losses since there would be fewer at the front and able to properly attack at once.

"Uh... no."

"Let's get out of the encirclement."

"How?"

"Just follow me once I start moving."

"Akari!" Nira yells.

The only response she gets are 4 nepents shattering in two pairs and clearing a path for them, for which Nira takes off, followed by Asuna.

Nira activates a sword skill to cut through some roots that swing at them and break through, breaking out of the encirclement.

After they put a little distance between them and the nepents, which moved pretty slow.

"Go back to town now," Nira says.

"Geez..."

Nira turns to Akari, "There's one with a flower already here, so we just need one more after that."

"I have one, I've already completed the quest and just happened to get it, you can have it."

"That makes things quicker," Nira says before Akari says, "I'm going to kill the one with the flower real quick."

The way drops worked in ACO meant that even if she killed it with a bow, she would get the item straight in her inventory.

"Okay."

She heads off in the direction of the nepents, and without even going out of sight, looses two arrows and walks back to them, closing a drops window.

Asuna produces her flower from her inventory and hands it to Nira.

"Thanks."

"By the way, you mentioned your partner having sword _s_ , plural. Would his name happen to be Kirito?" Nira asks.

"Yes... do you know him? Also how did you know?" she asks.

"Somewhat. From the beta. And I took a guess because I knew that he was likely around your age, a he, a skilled player, so probably a beta player, and a dual wielder, which limits the number of people to the point where I can't think of another person like that off the top of my head. There were hardly any dual-wielders."

"Oh... Wait, how did you know how old Kirito was if you only met him in the beta?"

"I guessed from the little he mentioned of the real world," Nira says.

The three head back together, since the spawn cap for them had been reached (respawning is needed for the game, but it would hardly feel immersive if you escape a group of all the nepents in the area without killing them, only to run into more within the supposed area from which they gathered), they didn't see any more nepents on their way back and made it peacefully, where they split up and go their separate ways, Nira and Akari getting their [Anneal Blades] and Asuna meeting up with Kirito.

* * *

"Hey Asuna, how'd it go?" Kirito asks.

"Pretty bad. I messed up and cut a fruit. I got saved by a pair of girls. One of whom managed to guess your name just from me saying 'he is upgrading his swords' and said she knew you a little and the other didn't say anything to me."

"What were their names?"

"I forgot to ask, sorry."

"How did they fight?"

"The one who guessed your name is a dual wielder, like you. The other is an archer."

"Hmm... a dual wielder from the beta who I knew suggests that it would be Nira..."

"Oh yeah, I remember she mentioned the archer's name, it was Akari."

"Oh, then it's definitely her. The two were, as far as I know, literally always together."

"Are they good? I mean, she seemed pretty good..."

"Out of our 9 duels, she beat me 6 times and one of the times I beat her hardly counts because she was highly sleep deprived, to the point where she fell asleep practically immediately after on the grass where we were dueling, so practically she beat me on 6 of 8," he says.

"Ouch. This is probably gonna sting a bit, but..."

"What?"

"She's like... 11 or 12, or maybe a 13 year old who hasn't really hit puberty yet," Asuna says.

Kirito winces.

"I got repeatedly schooled by little kid..."

"Is Akari any good?"

"Probably the best support player. Definitely best archer," Kirito says.

"Oh... they didn't seem to have particularly good gear, and she was just now getting the [Anneal Blade]. You got it on the third day."

"Who knows, if they're that young, maybe they were just scared and just now built up the determination or courage to fight," Kirito says, trying to picture the girl who beat him, hard, as a scared 12 year old and failing.

"We'll probably run into them again sometime soon anyway. Maybe in the dungeon or when we eventually find the boss. We can ask them," Kirito says.

* * *

Nira twirls the two swords and says, "Nice to have a decent sword. And it's in black, which is great."

"Well. [Dungeon] time," Akari says and the two start walking towards it. The [Dungeon] was about 10 minutes away.

After a few minutes of walking, Nira says, "It's interesting... the moment we don't have a choice of whether to play or not, it becomes no fun. I mean pain aside, since we don't get hit much, it's still basically the same game, and yet... it's not nearly as fun as during the beta. During the beta, exploring the [Dungeon] was fun. Now it's a task, at least mostly."

"Well, the risk of death is real mood killer, I'd say."

"Really? Don't people do risky things for fun a lot? Like trying to climb Mt. Everest for example. And generally, thrilling things," Nira points out.

"Most 'risky' things have actually very small risk. On a roller coaster, for example, it's immediately scary, but there is no fear or risk of death. Climbing Mt. Everest is an exception. Here the risk is constant and very real. Death and pain."

"I guess... but there are plenty of outdoor sports with very real risks that plenty of people do. Sure, they're a subset of people, but still..."

"Either way, the big difference I think is not the being forced to play, though it is also a factor, but the pain and potential death," Akari says.

"I suppose you're probably right," Nira agrees before falling into thought.

* * *

3 days later, Nira and Akari, both considerably higher level but still not boss level, were exploring the top floor of the [Dungeon], which means that the boss room could be around any corner.

Of course, they weren't the only ones who were exploring. With a designed for a game with 10k players, even assuming most of them didn't try, it would be a tall order for 2 people to do too much, especially since it was mostly a matter of covering ground and getting lucky.

There was a map kept at the center of Horunka and anyone could add their map data to it, and so it slowly built up the knowledge of the labyrinth.

And they were among the around 200 people actively trying to clear the game. 2% of the players. The rest were either dead, in the [Town of Beginnings], or just trying to get stronger.

"Die die die you stupid kobolds!" Nira yells after getting hit.

Akari chuckles a little, causing Nira to pout after the last of the kobolds obeys her orders.

"Is it that bad?" Akari asks.

"Have you ever had your arm slashed with a sword? It fucking hurts. A lot," Nira says.

"Maybe I should try it some time," Akari says jokingly.

Nira playfully swings her sword at her, stopping it a few inches away from her arm before sheathing it.

"Well, let's keep going. Maybe we'll get lucky and find it," Nira says and they start walking again.

They turn around a corner and-

"Well... that was quick."

"Yeah... so... let's go find someone who can organize a meeting. Like Argo. And then go do something. Maybe find a dungeon or do some side quests?" Akari suggests.

* * *

"You two wanted to meet?" Argo asks.

They were sitting in a cafe at the edge of the town farthest from the dungeon and had just gotten some water.

"Yeah."

"Before we get to that... you two are a lot younger than I expected."

"Really? The all-knowing Argo couldn't figure out our ages?" Akari asks teasingly.

"To be fair, you two never said a word about the real world during the beta," Argo whines.

"From how you look in your cloak, I'd guess that you were much younger than you are," Nira says.

Argo growls. "This coming from the literal preteen. Besides, I'm still taller than _you_."

"Technically, I recently turned 13, so I'm a teenager now. Though I wasn't the last time we met. Anyway, I'll get taller, you probably won't," Nira says.

"Whatever you say. Anyway, what did you two want? Information?"

"We found the boss room. We don't plan to fight it because we're too low leveled, so we'd like you to organize a meeting to fight to boss," Akari says.

"You? Low leveled?"

"Never mind that."

"Well whatever, maybe I'll pay to tell me some other time, though I can probably guess. Since you're not charging me for the boss's location, I'll organize a meeting as payment," Argo says, mostly to herself as justification for breaking her rule of never doing anything for free. She wouldn't give you the time of day for free. While in general an exaggeration, that specific example was true, though mostly as a joke because the time is on your HUD.

"Thanks Argo," Akari says.

* * *

 **Sorry that this is a bit on the shorter side, I originally had like 1.5k more words here, but if I kept those I'd also need to fit the first boss fight there and then it would be WAY too long so instead I moved that to the beginning of chapter 4 and ended this here.**

 **Please review and tell me what you thought and/or point out mistakes.**

 **Thanks for reading and bye! Please come back again, though if you made it to chapter 3, you probably will anyway.**


	4. Chapter 4

2 days later, there was a boss meeting which Nira and Akari attended, though they didn't plan on fighting the boss. The person who was going to be leading the raid was a man named Diabel, a small-time guild leader during the beta, though he seemed to be hiding that he was a beta tester.

They sat at the top of the amphitheater and stayed quiet. Nobody payed them much attention.

The meeting went reasonably well until Diabel had people split up into groups, when an orange cactus jumped down and yelled, "My name's Kibaou. Before we continue on, I got something to get off my chest."

Nira whispers, "Bet you it's a beta hater."

"Not taking that bet," Akari answers.

"Some of you here need to apologize to the 2000 players who've died so far!"

"Kibaou, are you talking about the beta testers?" Diabel asks carefully.

"Of course I am! When this whole thing started, the beta testers just up and vanished, leaving the new guys to fend for themselves! They should get down on their knees and apologize AND give up the items and money they stole."

"You two!" he turns towards them. "You're beta testers, right?"

What makes you think that?" Nira asks.

"I'd say you're just a jackass who decided that we'd be easy pickings for bullying out of our stuff. After all, even _if_ we are beta testers, and even _if_ the beta testers are _somehow_ responsible for the deaths of those who have died so far, among whom beta testers are over-represented by a factor of 2, how on Earth does that mean we have to give our stuff to _you_ , a random person not in anyway related to or representing the dead who seems to be pretty well off, better than most beta testers, even," Nira adds, causing Kibaou to tremble with anger.

"So how about this. We duel, and if you win, I give you all my stuff, and if you lose, you shut the fuck up and stop interrupting this meeting. Oh, and, I won't use my weapons," Nira says and jumps down to the bottom of the stadium, which was only slightly painful with their superhuman avatars. She challenges Kibaou to a half-death duel.

An extremely angry Kibaou accepts the duel. The timer starts.

As it reaches 5 seconds remaining, Kibaou says, "Don't cry when you get hurt, little girl."

Nira giggles in the most infuriating manner she can manage. "That's if you can land a hit on me."

The duel starts and Kibaou charges forward with his bastard sword in a horizontal swing.

Nira ducks down and places her palm on the bottom side of his sword, pushing it up and over her head before rolling aside of his body.

She stands straight again, smiling.

Kibaou spins around with his sword out and tries to cut her, only for her to repeat the exact same maneuver again, managing to time her motions perfectly.

She sidesteps a vertical swing and jumps over a low horizontal swing, planting her foot onto the top of the blade and driving it into the ground, jumping off before it hits to maintain her balance.

A few people chuckled or giggled, including Asuna and Kirito. Akari openly laughed.

Nira raises her foot and brings it down in an axe kick on Kibaou's wrist (he'd let go of the 1.5 handed sword with one hand), making him let out a very unmanly scream of pain and drop his sword, hit Nira picks up, with a fairly large but hidden amount of effort.

"You said you weren't going to use weapons," Diabel points out.

"I said I wasn't going to use _my_ weapons. Never said anything about _his_ weapons," Nira says and swings the sword at surprisingly fast speed. A rather amusing and adorable sight in its own way, a short girl swinging around a large, heavy sword.

Kibaou barely manages to avoid the swing, still grasping his wrist with his other hand.

"But whatever, I won't use it either."

Nira finishes a spin and angles the blade's path downwards, smashing it into the ground and letting go just before the impact to avoid recoil, causing the blade to bounce. The impact makes a loud clang before the sword clatters to the ground.

If she repeated the maneuver a few more times, it wouldn't take her long to destroy the sword, not that she planned to.

She runs forward, dodging under a sloppy punch from Kibaou's left hand, since his right wrist was brokenâ€"even though the game didn't actually show gore and anatomy if you got cut, it did simulate itâ€"so he had trouble using it and punching would be extremely painful.

She drives her own fist into Kibaou's solar plexus causing him to double over, gasping for breath. He lost a small portion of his HP.

"You have two options right now. You can keep trying to fight and I literally beat you till you're half dead, which won't take long, but will be pretty painful. Your second option is to surrender now and save yourself a world of pain."

"Go screw yourself!" he gasps out.

"Have it your way, though your stupidity is almost painful," Nira says with a sigh. She didn't particularly fancy actually beating him to death. Or half to death, but that's besides the point.

As he stands to his feet, she spins a full circle with one foot up, driving her heel into his throat. In his unstable position, he gets thrown onto his back. This time his HP drops by about 25% and starts to slowly continue dropping.

She grabs his head by the sides and twists sharply, breaking his neck with a sound that made her slightly sick. Still, it was probably the least painful way to beat him at this point.

Because they were in a safe zone, his HP stopped at half full and then instantly recovered to full, his wounds all healed, and granting her the victory. There was still lingering pain though.

As Nira gets up she fights down the urge to vomit, her mind unhelpfully supplying gross mental images, including his crushed throat or dead body with his broken neck at an odd angle.

As Nira sits down next to Akari, Akari says, "After that obvious display of overwhelming skill, I don't think we can get away with not fighting the boss. Well whatever, we can always be crowd control."

The grouping process puts them in a group with Asuna and Kirito, 2 people short of a full party, not that it mattered, they were certainly the strongest party. And because Diabel was a greedy fuck, they were all put on crowd control so that they wouldn't get a chance to get the LAB. Akari and Nira didn't mind, since they hadn't planned to fight the boss in the first place. Asuna didn't even know about the LAB so she didn't mind and Kirito minded a little.

The boss fight was taking place tomorrow, but the four still walked together since none of them felt like wasting their energy grinding and they wanted to get to know each other.

"That was rather brutal," Asuna comments, referring to Nira literally beating Kibaou.

"There are far more brutal and painful ways I could have done that. For example just knocking his feet out and then repeatedly slamming his face into the floor. Or I could have broken his ribs with repeated blows and then continue hitting him in the chest until the broken ribs puncture his heart or lungs. Or just force him onto his back and repeatedly punch him in the face, which combined with the impacts against the floor by the back of his head would drain his HP fairly quickly."

"Okay, we get it, what you did was relatively not-brutal, but still... did you have a nightmare or something?" Akari asks.

"Yes actually, don't remember it though."

"Why didn't you-"

"Didn't want to bother you."

"I'm going to have nightmares now," Asuna says, causing everybody else to chuckle.

"So how come you two were only getting the [Anneal Blade] recently?" Kirito asks, changing the subject from Nira practically killing a high level, armed player with her bare hands—since while the duel stopped him from dying, he would have otherwise died. Brutally.

"We were too scared to go out..." Akari admits with some embarrassment.

"If not for Kirito, I'd probably have done the same, and I'm at least 5 or 6 older than you and even more older than Nira," Asuna says.

"I'm 13. Akari's 15," Nira supplies.

"Then I'm 8 and 6 years older than you and Akari respectively."

"On a different topic, are you and Kirito, uh, a couple?" Akari asks.

Kirito chuckles, Asuna answers, "We're married. Have been for 2 and a half years, since Kirito turned 18."

"And before you ask, we don't have any children. We wouldn't both be playing video games at the same time if we had a 1-year-old kid," Asuna says.

"I guessed that much," Akari says.

"What about you two? Maybe somebody else one of you likes?" Asuna asks.

"No and no," Nira answers.

"Do you two live together?"

"With my sister and her wife," Akari answers.

"Oh..." Asuna says, deciding not to ask any further since people their age, especially Nira's, tended to live with their parents, so since they _didn't_ , there might be some topics they'd rather not talk/think about there. Especially for Nira, who didn't even live with any members of her own family. Birth family anyway.

"Where did you learn to fight like that? 3 months of SAO isn't nearly enough to learn to fight like you do, bare handed or with swords," Kirito says, once more changing the topic.

"I do kendo, as for bare handed combat, I really don't know. I did a little martial arts but I turned out to be good enough to not need to for just self defense and it didn't really interest me so I dropped it. The thing with Kibaou was just him being sluggish and incompetent. He probably stole his gear, or bullied someone out of it, anyway."

"Your solution probably won't last. He'll just be more pissed and hate beta testers more," Kirito says.

"There's no changing what he thinks anyway."

"We can still discredit what he says. Which is harder if people think we respond with violence to him."

"People don't care about facts, they care about feelings. And he is very good at being very passionate and standing on the graves of the dead, metaphorically. They don't care that beta testers are overrepresented among the dead by a factor of two. As far as they're concerned, we have some advantage and so, automatically, we must have gained it by pushing somebody else down. They want somebody to blame for their problems, instead of trying to solve them, and instead of blaming Kayaba, who is out of their reach, they blame the beta testers, who are right there. Also he pissed me off and wanted to take my hard-earned stuff," Nira says.

"That's probably true, but there are people who don't have a firm opinion and who could be swayed either way," Kirito says.

"Just try not to respond by beating him half to death every time he makes you angry," Kirito says.

"I'll try," Nira says with a smile.

"The raid is tomorrow and there's still plenty of time. Maybe we want to do some fun quest or something?" Asuna suggests.

"I'm up for it, as long as it's nothing too difficult. It'll let us get used to fighting together," Akari says.

* * *

The quest they found involved clearing a mine which might have a hidden treasure (it did) from monsters. It wasn't particularly difficult and the only reward was a load of money, no gear, as well as some XP. Still, worthwhile for the XP, col and practicing to fight together.

By the time they finished and left the mines, it was evening. "See you tomorrow?"

"Well, it's not like _we_ will die over night," Nira says with a teasing smile.

"Haha," Kirito says sarcastically, "Very funny."

"I feel like there's a story here," Asuna comments.

"Nope, definitely nothing," Kirito says.

"Right..." Asuna says.

"It's just like what it sounds like. We were doing some quests together, Akari and I logged off for the night with the plan to meet in the morning and do a quest which requires not having died in a week and we left with a message of 'try not to die over night', and, as you can guess since this is a story, Kirito died over night. We ended up doing the quest without him because it was on the last day of the beta."

"And to rub it in my face, you two refused to tell me what the quest was about," Kirito adds.

"Well, to be fair, you still haven't told us how you managed to die either," Akari answers.

"Oh, I see. Wait, why don't you just ask Argo?" Asuna says.

"The mission came as a surprise at the end so only the people who actually hardly died could even attempt it. Which ended up meaning the only people who did the apparently very difficult quest past the very beginning are Nira and Akari... and they refused to sell the information to Argo, even though she offered an outrageous price, probably because the beta was almost over and the money would be worthless and they knew I would be able to buy the info from Argo."

"Seriously?" Asuna asks Nira.

"Yep. By the way, even if there was another month or two of the beta left but the quest wouldn't be available, we wouldn't have sold the info to Argo. As much to rub it in her face that we know something she can't find out as to make sure Kirito doesn't find out."

"You two are horrible," Kirito comments.

"Yep!" Nira says with a smile.

* * *

"This is it, huh? The first step out of 100," Nira says.

"I guess so..." Akari says.

"Well... it shouldn't be too hard. Everyone is several levels higher than during the beta and we managed to very gruelingly come pretty close to killing it with just the two of us in the beta. If _everyone_ follows the plan, then we should be able to get through without any casualties-" Nira says and is interrupted by Asuna.

"That's the idea," she says.

"-which means that inevitably someone will get greedy and break from the plan and one of us will need to save them and probably end up getting seriously hurt." Nira finishes.

"That's pretty pessimistic."

"Would you rather I assume that there is no risk?" Nira asks.

"Well, no, but..."

"If there is a decent number of people and a stupid thing to be done, at least one person will probably do it. Though... depending on the type of stupid, it is quite likely to be me."

"Really? What about... I don't know... jumping off a cliff."

"Plenty of people do that, for some reason or another. Have you heard of cliff jumping? It's a real sport."

"Uh... okay, bad example."

"Anyway, try to watch for anyone being stupid."

Diabel finishes his encouragement speech and opens the gates to the boss room.

The groups spread out as he gives orders according to the plan discussed yesterday. And then for around 15 minutes the incomplete party of 4 was killing minions.

As the boss's HP drops to 25%, Diabel runs forward and yells, "I got this!"

"See, greedy idiot," Nira comments. _Well, he should be fine if this is like the beta._

"Get back! That's not a tulwar!" Kirito yells as the boss draws his second sword.

Diabel ignores him. Nira runs forward at her top speed and pushes him aside just as the boss came down, causing her to take the hit, partially blocked and partially dodged, herself. The blow sends her flying back the way she came and making her let out a cry of pain.

"Nira!" Akari yells and drops her bow in order to catch Nira, stumbling back. Asuna had already produced a healing potion and Akari fed it to Nira, whose HP had dropped to just several percent.

As the potion takes effect, the pain fades and Nira relaxes and opens her closed eyes.

"That is something I never want to feel again."

"That was _way_ to close," Akari says as Nira stands up from her position leaned against Akari.

"I hope you're grateful, you total retard!" Akari yells at Diabel, who was among a considerable group of people worried for him. She wanted to strangle them. Because of _his_ idiocy and/or greed, _Nira_ very nearly died saving him.

"Computer program or not, I want payback," Nira says.

Akari is about to protest but decides that Nira was considerably _less_ likely to get hurt again.

"Don't worry, I don't plan on experiencing that again. Terrifying and incredibly painful."

Nira silently walks around the busy boss, not making a sound. Illfang pays her no attention.

She walks up behind him. Illfang stills pays no attention to her.

She leaps into the air and drives her swords through the back of his neck and his heart. Illfang has no attention left to pay.

The boss shatters and Nira drops to the ground, sheathing her swords.

"You have no idea how much better that makes me feel," Nira comments as Akari walks up to her.

"What's the LAB?" Akari asks.

"Let me check," Nira says and taps on the tab in the rewards window for beating the boss.

"[Coat of Midnight]. It has amazing stats, at least for this stage of the game," Nira says as she equips it. The black coat appears on her.

"It looks badass."

"It _feels_ badass," Nira responds.

A little ways away, Asuna says to Kirito, "That coat looks like it would look pretty badass on you."

Kirito chuckles. "True. She definitely earned it though."

"To be fair, it also looks pretty badass on her," Asuna says and then adds after a moment, "Aren't girls her age, or at least apparent age, supposed to be cute, not badass?"

"Why not both?" Kirito asks.

The two walk over to where Nira and Akari were standing.

As everybody celebrates, Kibaou yells, "...

* * *

 **Yes, I deliberately left that quote open. Sorry this took a bit longer than the others.**

 **Please tell me what you thought with a review!**


	5. Chapter 5

**I really haven't made it to chapter 5 on a lot of stories...**

* * *

As everybody celebrates and cheers for the Nira, Kibaou yells, "Quit celebrating!"

"Because of you 4, Diabel nearly died!" he yells at the group Kirito, Asuna, Akari, and Nira.

Akari turns towards him with an ice cold expression. "Is that right? Please, explain," she says in a bone-chilling voice.

Kibaou shudders but stands his ground. "You, and the rest of the beta testers, just wanted to get all the rewards for the boss yourself, so you told us a lie about the weapon."

Akari starts laughing condescendingly. "You really are stupid."

"If we had wanted the boss reward for ourselves, we wouldn't have agreed to mob clean up. We wouldn't have told you where the boss was after _we_ found it. Kirito wouldn't have warned Diabel, who in his greed and idiocy, ignored Kirito. And Nira wouldn't have nearly died to save your stupid idol, who charged in not out of some form of heroism, but because of greed, because he wanted to get the [Last Attack Bonus]."

"You fail to comprehend that the beta testers are in the same boat as you and also want to get out. No, you don't fail to comprehend that, you don't even consider it. The idea of not having someone to blame terrifies you because if you don't have someone to blame, you have act yourself. You're not just stupid, you're _willfully_ stupid. The fact that Diabel ignored that the booklet itself warned that many things had changed from the beta test is his fault and his alone. Aincrad is 15 times bigger than it was in the beta, that alone is proof that things have changed."

" _Nira_ is the reason that Diabel is _alive_. At much risk and pain to herself, no less."

"She-"

"If you are willing to say that she faked it, then I'm sure you're willing to prove it by getting cut similarly yourself?" Akari asks.

Kibaou doesn't finish whatever he had started to say.

She walks to Diabel and says quietly to him, "And _you_ should remember that you owe Nira your life and that I _will_ stop her from risking her life to save yours again. Her life is infinitely more valuable to me than yours and I won't allow her to die to save your stupid, greedy hide. The _one_ amusing thing about this is that Nira predicted that this would happen."

Diabel just nods.

"One last thing. I'm not sure how the idea that you could have a conspiracy out of 10% of the population came to your mind. That is completely ridiculous. Have you heard the saying 'three can keep a secret only if two are dead'? You except 1000 people to be able to keep secret?"

* * *

"He probably really hates you both now."

"He's probably lost most of his support except the very most faithful, and if he goes after us he's going after two 'little girls', which can't be good for his support either, and if he's alone, there's nothing he can do. Also I was in a bad mood and felt like venting," Akari says.

"I'm hungry," Nira comments.

"We'll see you later," Akari says.

"Before you go, let's add each other," Kirito says.

Once all 4 friend pairs are made (friending is bi-directional and **((** Asuna and Kirito **)** and **(** Nira and Akari **))** (previous parentheses in the math sense to avoid confusingly having 4 'and's in a row) were already friends), the two groups split apart and head their separate ways.

* * *

In the next week, they encountered Asuna and Kirito a few more times, and even teamed up to get the [Martial Arts] skill, a painful rock punching endeavor until one of them accidentally activated a [Martial Arts] skill and half broke the rock in a single blow, after which they quickly destroyed it. 8 days after the first boss, the second boss had been found and a meeting had been organized.

As they arrived just before the meeting started and sat down in the back, Kibaou and his faithful group of 3 (the rest had left him) glared at them.

Diabel was leading the raid and Nira and Akari had teamed up with Asuna and Kirito again.

In the beta, the boss fight consisted of two bosses, one of which was larger and stronger than the other. In the beta, the second one activated when the first one was defeated and it had resulted in a full wipe, since they were caught by surprise by a boss. The second time they had expected it and most of their forces were put aside to deal with the main boss because the first one was actually relatively easy when they knew its patterns. The bosses were named [Nato the Colonel Taurus] and [Baran the General Taurus].

"What do you think the difference will be? A third boss?" Nira asks.

"Maybe, who knows," Akari says.

* * *

The second fight had gone well. Argo ran in and warned everyone of a third boss, [Asterius the Taurus King], all of a minute after it appeared, but at least she had found out about its weakness through a bunch of small quests. Several people nearly died, but they were saved by Akari's timely stuns of the boss with her bow (because apparently mastering a bow in a month was something well out of the reach of everybody and so there were very few other skilled bow users and none among the raid group, leading to a very unbalanced raid group).

In the end, nobody had died, or even gotten particularly hurt, and Kirito had gotten the LAB.

* * *

The third boss fight was a tree. Literally. A living tree, but still a tree. [Nerius the Evil Treant]. It went well, with no casualties and no changes from the beta. Nira had gotten the LAB, though it could just as well have been Kirito. Both of them had done far more than their share of damage to the boss, as opposed to Asuna and Akari, whose stabbing attacks did next to nothing to the boss.

The LAB was a key for who-knows-what.

* * *

The fourth floor boss, [Wythege the Winged Hippocampus] had been a pain because it stayed in the water and the only time he was not in the water was when he was flying above or diving. Thankfully, in exchange he was insanely squishy. A few lucky shots in critical points from Akari and a couple other bow users, though mostly Akari, had done huge chunks of damage, and Nira, Kirito, and Asuna, all of whom were very fast were able to land hits with their swords, which also melted its HP.

Once more nobody had died, though someone had gotten seriously hurt, and Akari got the LAB.

* * *

The fifth boss had gone down with hardly a fight when Nira managed cut its head off all of 30 seconds into the fight. Nobody even got hit, though the boss did hit the shield of one tank.

* * *

"At this rate, we'll be out in 'just' two years," Nira says with a sad sigh.

"It could be a lot worse, if we fought a boss every month we would take over 8 years to get out."

"'It could be worse' isn't exactly comforting. Even you can present me a situation where it _can't_ get worse, then I'd love to hear it. Add a killer asteroid or nuclear war to practically anything and it gets worse."

"We could be dead."

"Being tortured eternally with no chance of escape would be worse."

"Still, we're making good progress."

"I guess, so."

Akari ruffles Nira's hair. Nira struggles out and pouts, running her fingers through her hair in order to clean it up.

* * *

On floor 9, Nira, Akari, Kirito, and Asuna teamed up again to finish the Elf War campaign quest line and earned greatly improved weapons for all of them.

A little later, the four sat in a large tree, looking over a river and eating sandwiches made by Asuna.

"Since when can you cook this well, Asuna?" Nira says with smile on her face after wolfing down her second sandwich.

"Slow down," Akari mutters.

"Since before we've known each other," Kirito says.

"Still half-convinced you only married because you wanted me to cook for you," Asuna jokes and they all laugh.

"Is it just me or is it kind of cold up here?" Akari asks.

Asuna nods her head in agreement. Due to their choice of attire, Kirito and Nira just look at each other and shrug.

Nira goes through her inventory in order to retrieve the [Coat of Midnight] which had amazing insulation against cold and, surprisingly, heat. She had recently replaced it with a better but similar looking coat.

"Huh."

"What?"

"The key I got from the third boss is glowing. Well, we can figure it out later," Nira says and passes Akari the coat. "And just keep it, since I don't need it anymore."

Akari puts the coat on and Nira comments, "It actually looks pretty cool on you."

"I think I'll pass on wearing it all the time, especially since wearing it on top of my considerably better armor is annoying," Akari says.

Asuna had put on a boring white cloak.

"Put on some pants and you won't be cold as often," Nira suggests.

Asuna growls. "If you had _any_ semblance of style and-"

"I think I look just fine like this," Nira says, "Pants and all."

"You may look _fine_ , but you don't look particularly _good_ ," Asuna responds with a huff.

"Form after function. We're in a fucking death game," Nira retorts.

"Easy for you to say, it's not like you have anything to show off anyway."

"I'm barely 13, that's not particularly abnormal."

"Should we stop them?" Kirito whispers to Akari.

"It's funny. Let's not."

* * *

A short while later, Kirito and Akari had intervened, leaving a smug Nira and playfully mad Asuna.

"Let's find out what's going on with the key," Kirito suggests.

Nira summons the key from her inventory and says, "It's pulling that way," pointing in a direction.

"Pulling?"

"Yeah, look," Nira says and flips her hand over before letting go of the key, clearly not moving it. It moves sideways as it falls and then slides slowly along the ground.

"Let's just see where it takes us?" Akari suggests.

"What's the worst that could happen," Asuna says.

"Famous last words," Kirito comments.

"We could be slowly tortured to death one by one?" Nira suggests.

"Shouldn't have asked."

"Or maybe have our bodies controlled and us just having to watch as we torture each other to death one by one."

"Thanks Nira. Very helpful."

"Practically speaking, we could walk into a trap and all die."

"Unlikely," Kirito comments.

"True, but still within the realms of possibility."

"That applies to what you said before as well," Kirito points out.

"Go fuck yourself."

Everybody chuckles.

* * *

The key leads them to one of the giant trees, its pull getting so strong that it flies out of Nira's hand and into the tree, where a door and a way down opens.

"Let's go down?" Kirito suggests.

"Wh-"

"Don't say it," Akari says.

The group steps down and the door closes behind them.

"So much for not walking into a trap," Asuna comments.

Nira walks back up to the door and puts her hand on it. It opens.

"...Or not, I guess," Asuna says.

As Nira steps back, the door closes once more.

"I guess the idea is that nobody else gets to come in, not that we're trapped," she says.

* * *

 **And I'm sorry for ending this here. Truly am. However I want to read a bit and go to bed and would rather post this now and this was a reasonable stopping point.**

 **Please review, follow, and favorite!**


	6. Chapter 6

**Sorry for the shorter chapter last time.**

* * *

The party of 4 descended down the steps into the unknown dungeon. The walls were made of living wood, looking not like it had been carved out but like it had just grown this way. The walls shrunk in going up and fused together, forming a living wood tunnel. The floor, even steps, were the same.

They descended the steps in silence for a few minutes.

"This is really far down," Asuna comments.

"We always have teleport crystals to get out," Nira points out.

"That's true... so much for walking into traps."

"We just _all_ managed to forget the biggest failsafe we have," Akari says.

"I wonder how far down this goes, I'd say we've already gone down 100 meters at least," Nira says, "Also odd how it would stay wooden this far down."

Just as Nira says, the floor levels out and becomes a long hallway stretching off into the distance, a strange fog preventing them from seeing its end. There were alcoves on the sides occasionally, though their contents could not be seen from their position.

"Let's go?" Kirito says and the group starts walking down the corridor.

As they reach the first alcove they see that it contains a door, which they open, which in turn leads to a small room with a single wooden chest with some green designs on it which look like vines.

"A trap?" Akari suggests.

"Definitely a trap," Kirito suggests.

"Let's open it! ...After Akari shoots it," Nira says.

They all step out of the room and Akari grabs her bow and draws an arrow, shooting it at the chests lock, which shatters, being made of wood. The chest snaps open and a highly opaque green gas fills the room from inside it.

Kirito closes the door.

"It'll probably clear out in a bit."

A few minutes later, they open the door and the gas had settled on the floor and flows out, spreading over the floor of the hallway they were in and practically disappearing.

Nira carefully walks into the room and looks into the open chest.

"Anything?" Asuna asks.

"Nope, nothing. Completely empty," Nira says.

"Well that was a waste of time," Asuna says.

"""Never walk away from potential loot,""" all three gamers say.

"Unless you're already geared up with legendary gear or whatever and you know it'll be trash," Nira adds.

"Okay, okay," Asuna says, holding her hands up in surrender.

The four continue down the tunnel till the next alcove, which also has a door.

Nira carefully opens the door and only her lightning reflexes save her from being hit by the dart that flies out. It was made of wood and had a slimy green coating on the tip, suggesting it was almost certainly poison.

Nira waits a few seconds before looking in again. Exactly 13 seconds after the first dart, a few seconds—just enough to make you feel like there won't be more—flies out, followed a second later by a third.

"I think we should come back to this one in a bit," Akari suggests.

"That sounds reasonable," Kirito agrees since they didn't know how many levels (in the Game Theory sense) Kayaba had been playing on when he made that trap.

Confirming that their choice had been correct, another dart flies out.

"Geez, why not just make an infinite stream of darts or something?" Asuna asks.

"Because that would be no fun," Nira says, "And aside from the death and pain, and VR for that matter, ACO is still an MMORPG."

"If you say so."

They walk past the door to the next one. The door opens and nothing happens, it opens into an enormous dining hall like structure with long tables positioned lengthwise in the room and rows of chairs. The chairs and tables were all part of the floor. The tables were covered in various fancy foods and drinks with wooden plates and cups and bowls which were separate from the table. Vines hung down from the ceiling, but they didn't reach anywhere near the floor.

At the far end of the room, on raised platform, was a table perpendicular to the others. Sitting in the middle chair was a lone figure.

A skeleton, with a glowing sickly green orb in the center of his ribcage. His eyes glowed similarly.

"Welcome to my dining hall, young ones! Have a seat, drink something, eat something!" it says in a deep voice.

"Trap."

"Definitely."

"Agreed."

"Couldn't be more obvious."

"If you will not eat, then **you are not welcome here.** " the skeleton grows in size as it stands up, its eyes and core turning purple that fades to red. The chairs fill with skeletons. Actual dead ones, slumped over after they had eaten the food and died but whose skeletons were held together by some magic even after the material which normally held them decayed.

An HP bar appear next to the skeleton, with the name [Thu'al the Host]

"Boss fight, and we haven't even fought any small monsters yet," Akari says.

"Well, the skeletons are practically garenteed to come alive, so there's that," Nira says.

The skeleton grabs a staff with his left hand. It had prongs that grasp around air where staves tended to have gems or something, however the moment he grabs it a similar orb forms in the claws.

"Oh come on, I thought there was no magic!" Asuna says.

"Just for the players. We only get magic items and combat skills. Enemies occasionally get magic or similar things," Nira answers.

"How is that fair!?" Asuna asks.

"Who says it has to be. Besides, it's balanced so that it generally works out fine."

He swings it releasing a wave of the light. The group all duck however it doesn't even reach them, stopping at the ends of the tables.

The eyes of the skeletons glow with a similar light, though dimmer, and they stand, wooden weapons forming out of the floor for them to grab.

"I'm starting to think you might be psychic," Kirito says to Nira.

"Anyone could have guessed that would happen," Nira answers.

"That's true, even for most of your predictions, but the fact that they're always right, no matter how specific, is disturbing," Kirito says as he draws his swords and gets ready for approaching hoard.

As Nira draws her swords she says, "Anyone wanna bet that killing the big one will kill all of them?"

"Nobody's going to bet against you. Besides, the big one has a core of sorts and the small ones don't, so it seems very reasonable."

Nira smashes the first one that gets close with her sword, the monster going down in one hit.

"5... 4... 3... 2... 1..." Nira says and the skeleton reforms.

"How did-"

"The eyes didn't stop glowing, it was obvious."

"Why 5 seconds?"

"Just guessed. Seems like a reasonable amount," Nira says.

As the next few come Kirito and Nira smash them to pieces. Akari shoots a few before realizing it was pointless, since destroying individual ones wasn't worth the arrows, and switching to smashing them with her bow by using it like a club. Asuna had also been forced to revert to swings, since stabbing didn't do much to a skeleton, and was fairing the worst since she had a weapon that was incredibly light.

As for Kirito and Nira, they were smashing through the skeletons easily. A single swing of one of their swords, even a weak one, could knock the skeleton into it's recovering period. The issue was that all the enemies they killed got up after 5 seconds.

Nira notices something. "They don't even have HP bars, fighting them is pointless. We need to go after the main boss," she says.

Akari retreats between Kirito and Nira and draws her bow back, aiming for the skeleton's core, since it was a likely weak point. Or the arrow would just pass through it.

It doesn't. The arrow hits it with a sound similar to hitting glass and the boss HP drops down by about 10%.

If nothing changed this would be easy, since Akari could _easily_ shoot 10 times long before Kirito and Nira run out of energy.

Of course, it would never be this easy, and the skeleton roars and grabs a wooden greatsword 2 meters long in his right hand.

It had intricate designs which coursed with the red energy.

He leaps at the group, smashing a bunch of the skeletons in the process.

He swings his sword and all 4 of them are forced to dodge.

Akari looses another arrow and the skeleton roars again before pointing his staff at her. She narrowly dodges the beam of energy that comes from it, burning the ground and skeletons it hits. The ground heals and the skeletons reconstruct.

Akari fires another arrow.

As Thu'al swings once more, Nira hits his sword with her own as she dodges. Her swords glance off the seemingly wooden sword like it was made of metal, much unlike the skeletons weapons, which could be easily destroyed, though they would regenerate.

"Foolish human."

Akari fires again.

As the fight progresses, they notice that after every swing the skeleton stopped. Not that it matter much, since by the time they noticed that, Akari loosed a 10th arrow and shattered the core, as well as depleted the first bar.

The core explodes in a wave of the red light, which they raise their hands to shield their faces from and which kills all the skeletons. Permanently, causing them to scatter into bones on the floor, no longer tied together. Since they had never been 'enemies', just terrain, of sorts, it made sense they didn't shatter.

The skeleton collapses. It does not shatter, though its HP bar vanishes.

"It's not dead yet," Akari guesses.

"Yeah, it hasn't shattered yet."

Their guess is correct as the energy flows over all the bones in the room and they rattle, flying into the air and at the skeleton, piling onto it.

The bones fill it out, making it look like a giant person of crushed white matter with a skull for a head and it rises, an HP bar appearing again and a new name appearing above it [Thu'al the Reborn]. His eyes blaze once more.

Its staff was gone and its sword was also made of seemingly bone know.

It roars, much more primal than before.

It leaps at them and as it comes down its sword smashes the ground, living a deep gash which starts to heal.

Akari shoots its throat, or where it would be if had a neck, instead she shoots its spine and it lets out a whine and drops to a kneeling position.

Kirito and Nira don't waste the opportunity, running at it and unleashing ridiculous combos of sword skills, abusing having two swords to avoid suffering from [Post-Motion Delay]. They did this by starting a skill with one sword as their other finished, causing the PMD to be canceled.

The boss's HP was dropping quickly as chunks of the bones were flung off of it.

It roars and starts to stand, causing the two to jump back after their PMD form their final skills, just a fraction of a second like most skills, wears off.

The thing swings its sword at them, but misses.

Asuna lunges and strikes at the sword, chipping off a chunk as it goes back.

A few repetitions later, the boss having become completely predictable, the boss is nearly dead and its sword shatters into polygons, signaling its _actual_ destruction. A few seconds of relentless attack from Nira and Kirito later and the boss shimmers and shatters, with Kirito having gotten the LAB.

"What did you get?" Akari asks.

"[Host's Greatsword], even though Asuna clearly destroyed it, but whatever. Guess we'll just sell it once we finish this. It's pretty good."

"Let's go check on that earlier door," Nira suggests.

The four return and find a few more darts on the floor.

Nira looks into the door and carefully walks in. It opens into a small room. A small _empty_ room.

"It's completely empty. Literally nothing in three. Not on the ceiling, floor, or walls. Complete troll," Nira says as she walks out.

"I'm glad we didn't wait for it then," Asuna says.

"Maybe there would have been loot if we had gone in immediately and avoided the darts by crouching or whatever," Akari wonders.

"It's possible, but let's keep moving."

The next alcove doesn't even have a door, and neither do the next few.

One has a free chest with some col and materials in it.

A few more are empty traps.

One had a room full of [Treant Saplings].

Once they reach the point which was as far as they could see from the beginning of the corridor there are no more alcoves.

"I think we've explored everything up to this point, so let's go."

They follow the corridor to a door at then end which leads into an open room with a huge door.

"This looks like a boss fight," Asuna says.

"No, it's the treasure room," Nira says sarcastically.

"It could be both," Kirito points out and opens the door.

Inside is a room filled with lush greenery and a small pool of water. There are ferns, vines, grass, bushes, flowers, small trees, all growing through some magic power without sunlight.

Standing in the room is a feminine creature with green skin which looks like it could he the stem of a plant. It had bark over most of its body, however the stomach, knees, hands, face, feet, and elbows were all exposed. She had long hair of vines.

There was no HP bar, but it was likely they just hadn't activated it.

She was looking at a yellow flower and then stands up and faces them. She smiles.

"Welcome to my garden, I am Actaea. Feel free to look around but don't trample anything," she says. An HP bar and a green cursor appear, with the name [Actaea]. Nothing like 'the Host' or 'the Kobold Lord' or 'the Evil Treant' as was generally true with bosses. Names sometimes changed though. They rarely reflected much more than the players could already know, plus the name of the creature.

"What's to say you won't just try to kill us?"

"Why would I do that?" the dryad asks.

"Pretty much everything else in here has thus far," Nira says.

"I assure you I don't want to harm you, in fact, I need your help," she says.

"What kind of help?"

"A terrible creature has taken over this place, masquerading as a [Nature Elemental], setting traps and spreading its filthy servants across the place. It locked the place and gave the key to a creature called Nerius, which you must have defeated. It has been unable to enter here so far, but that will only last so long. This place is dying, even now it feeds off of the very walls. I need you to help me get rid of it," the woman says.

A quest window pops in front of Kirito, the technical party leader.

Nira remembers that the tree they had entered was actually fairly dead, though they didn't notice at the time. So were the surrounding trees, which is why they didn't notice. It was a fairly smooth transition. The trees had less saturated bark and less leaves and the leaves they did half were withering.

"Let's do it?" he asks.

Akari and Nira nod, Asuna says, "Sure."

In ACO quest givers didn't turn into enemies without warning. Long monologues or transformations, things of that sort were always present. Thus, since she was a quest giver, they could be sure she wouldn't catch them by surprise.

"We'll help you."

"Thank you," she says and places a hand on the wall. Green energy flows from it and the bark parts revealing a corridor.

"I'll guide you, but I'm afraid I am not much good in a fight," the dryad says.

The party nods their acknowledgment and follow her down the maze of corridors until they reach a door which the dryad opens, leading to an enormous room.

There were 3 bark pillars at the sides of the room they didn't enter from. They had glass orbs which flowed with the sickly green energy, a mockery of what they had seen the dryad use. They were connected by beams of energy to a sapling in the middle which had a cage like structure near the base with the light that looked right.

The room had a dirt floor and wooden walls, covered in various flowers and grass. It all looked _wrong_.

Nira reaches down and touches a flower before flinching back and muttering, "Ow."

She looks at her burnt finger tips, the skin flaking slightly, before her [Battle Healing] skill kicks in and heals the injury.

"Be careful of the plants, they are but a mockery of real ones. They are traps in their own right," the dryad says.

"Noticed," Nira growls.

In the center of the 3 pillars a figure floated. It looked like a suit of armor made of bark with the sickly green energy inside it.

2 HP bars are next to its head with the name [Razan the Nature Elemental].

"Greetings adventurers, I am [Razan the Nature Elemental]. I warn you, beware that 'dryad', for she is no dryad but a disguised monster."

"Really? Because all of this looks like a sick mockery of nature. What are you really?" Nira says.

The creature laughs. The energy turns red. The plants all wither and die, turning to ash. The walls turn grey. Everything except the sapling in the middle.

The bark the pillars and creature are made of turns to black metal.

"I am [Naz'ar the Death Elemental]," the creature says. Its name changes accordingly.

"Destroy the orbs! It's using them to feed off the life here!" the dryad yells.

The creature laughs again, "I think _not_."

A rain of black metal arrows, incredibly simple with no arrow head and just coming to a point, falls down on them.

Nira stands in front of Akari and knocks aside the arrows that come towards with her swords them while Kirito and Asuna dodge.

Once the barrage stops Asuna asks in surprise, "You blocked _that_?!"

Nira smiles. Akari looses an arrow towards one of the closer orbs.

The boss's HP drops a small fraction.

"If these are like the skeleton before, it'll take around 10 hits per," Akari says.

"Akari, destroy that orb, Nira protect Akari so she can focus on shooting-"

"No need to tell me that," Nira says with a smirk.

"-Asuna, go after the other near orb and I'll get the last one!" Kirito yells, taking command.

"Alright," Asuna says.

Akari continues shooting as Asuna and Kirito run after the other two orbs.

Another barrage of black steel, dodged by Asuna and deflected by Nira and Kirito.

As Asuna reaches her orb she lunges it with [Linear], smashing into it and taking a chunk off the boss's HP bar. Akari looses one more arrow and the orb shatters. The boss screams.

It unleashes a beam of red light from its hand, directed and Nira and Akari who avoid the attack which leaves the ground black.

It fires at Asuna who dodges a second too slow and the beam catches her left hand, vaporizing it. Asuna's HP drops a small chunk but doesn't continue depleting, in other words the wound had been castrated. She just looks at it in surprise, clearly not in pain. In other words it had basically no effect, since she wasn't in pain and she didn't need her left hand for combat anyway. They would use a heal crystal—healing potions were generally not enough for severed limbs—later.

The face mask of the helmet opens and a large cone of the energy fires towards Kirito who barely manages to avoid the death beam on his way towards the far crystal.

He smashes the crystal with several sword skills and the first HP bar is depleted.

A long, thin black sword materializes in the hand of the death elemental and it dives towards Nira and Akari.

Nira parries its strike and retaliates however her sword simply glances off the thick metal plate.

The dryad started to move from her cover in the corner. Towards the sapling in the middle.

As she reaches it she yells, "I'll immobilize it, attack it!"

A wave of green energy expands from the sapling. It knocks the red light to a dim glow and the death elemental tumbles to the ground.

The 4 converge on it. Nira sees an orb down its neck and sheathes one sword, stabbing the other with both hands in to it.

The boss's HP drops by over half but a wave of red energy flings Nira into one of the walls, where she then tumbles to the ground and drops the sword in her hand. Her HP drops to just above the red at 30%.

The boss's red light reignites and it floats into the air. Its chest opens and the energy builds. It faces towards Nira, who was stumbling to her feet, swaying slightly, leaning on her sword, rubbing the back of her head, and saying, "Fuck that hurts."

Akari growls, "No you don't!" as she fires an arrow into the core, interrupting the attack and doing about half the boss's _remaining_ HP.

The chest closes and the boss flies high to recover its bearings.

Akari rushes to Nira. "Are you alright!?"

"I'm fine. Just a little dizzy," Nira says.

"And my head hurts," she adds.

"But I'll be fine."

Akari breathes a sigh of relief and hugs her, briefly as they were still in a boss fight.

Nira drinks a healing potion which brings her HP back up to around 80% and gets rid of her headache, though not the dizziness, which was already fading on its own.

Akari fires an arrow at the boss to no effect.

"Looks like we just have to wait for him to knocked down again."

Which comes shortly with a motivating yell of 'get it!' from the dryad.

And that they did, with Asuna and Kirito prying open the chest plate and Nira smashing the crystal.

The chunks of glass shatter into polygons, followed shortly by the rest of the boss.

"What did you get?" Akari asks.

"It better be good," she says as she checks.

A moment later, "That definitely counts."

"What is it?" Akari asks again.

"His sword," Nira says and equips instead of her weaker sword, her right sword.

"And it's actually the type of sword I like most instead of a longsword," she says.

The difference was that it was considerably thinner, a sort of cross between longsword and rapier. It was all black metal with red runes at the base of the blade.

"Does it do anything special?"

"Yep," Nira says.

"What?"

"Life steal. Doesn't work on undead," Nira says.

"That's pretty handy. Especially if it heals wounds and not just recovers HP," Kirito says.

"Yeah. But now I need a good smith to make me a similar sword more urgently because dual wielding with two swords of such different weight is going to be hard."

"We know a good smith!" Asuna says.

"Please, introduce me, once we finish this."

They approach the dryad, who turns from the sapling.

"Thank you for ridding this place of that fowl creature."

"You deserve a reward, but first, just watch," she says and turns back to the sapling, putting her hands on it. Green energy spreads over the cavern. Flowers and grass grows, the walls return to their brown color. Brighter than before.

Nira smiles and lays down on her back in the grass, closing her eyes.

Akari drops on her knees next to her and stealthily sneaks up right next to her before starting to tickle her, causing Nira to grab her and bringing them into a tumbling tickle fight which Asuna, Kirito, and Actaea watch with amusement.

"Still just children," Actaea says with a smile.

"Certainly don't act like it most of the time."

The tickle fight ends with Nira tapping out and both of them lying next to each other laughing.

Akari gets up a short while later Akari gets up and pulls Nira up.

* * *

A short while later the 4 found themselves back in the city. Their reward had been, aside from col and XP, a ring called the [Signet of the Living Caverns], which grants the wearer access to the [Living Caverns] through any tree in the [Forest of Unwavering Mists] (as opposed to the [Forest of Wavering Mists] on the third floor), as well as reducing the aggression of most nature-type monsters, even making some of the passive.

* * *

 **Whoo, I just wrote that in basically one session. Hope it makes up for the shorter chapter last time!**

 **Please tell me what you though (review) and come back next time!**


	7. Chapter 7

**First and foremost, thank you to** _gustave **.** rahm_ _01_ **and** _mernom_ **for** **reviewing and following!**

 **Also thank you** _GameLord The Hitman_ **and** _Hasse360_ **for favoriting and following.**

 **And finally, thank you** _al_ _'verde_ **for following!**

 **If you don't write (or maybe if you're just not me, who knows), you wouldn't know how nice it is to get reviews, especially ones which aren't just pointless hate. There's something extremely nice about knowing that someone cared enough to write a review. Unless this story somehow gets insanely popular (happened with my first story, which was jackshit, somehow) and gets a ton of reviews, I will try to reply to every review which isn't pointless hate (a review like 'this story sucks' with no explanation for why you believe so will not get more of response than 'care to elaborate?' (you can imagine someone speaking in an _extremely_ condescending tone for that) or 'go fuck yourself', so unless you get off on textual abuse or something, don't bother).**

 **On an unrelated note, I haven't been so in to writing a story in a while (maybe that was why my first story was popular? Because I didn't feel like I was forcing myself to write (as opposed to just thinking of it)? That or, more likely, because it wasn't an OC story). It's great.**

 **Fun fact: I just realized the _original_ idea behind this story was a fem-KiritoxSinon (Sinon is best girl and KiritoxSinon is best pairing) yuri pairing... Yeah... like nothing of _that_ is left now. Except 2 girls as main characters, an archer, and a dual-wielder. Not only is that gone, but so is the original scene I planned which made me change it from that...**

 **Another thing that has been changed to some extent is how I planned HP to work. Originally, I planned it to be almost literally % of oxygen in brain. Like (blood pressure * oxygen saturation in blood) in the brain. That plus some offset, because you'll die before that number reaches 0. Unfortunately, this still isn't completely realistic because if it is low enough for long enough you will still die and it can be very low for a short time without you dying. Also doesn't take into account certain types of poisons, like** **neurotoxins, and doesn't work for creatures without blood, which is a huge portion of creatures in RPGs (elementals, undead, plant monsters, etc.).**

 **Also geez is it hard to write a proper fight where each person has two swords. That's like... 6 things I have to keep track of. Each person's position and the position of each of the 4 swords. Sorry if the fight is a little hard to follow, just remember that 'right' and 'left' are going to be from the perspective of the person making the action.**

* * *

"You said you needed my help with something? Why is Klein here? Why is Liz here? And who are they?" Nira asks Kirito.

"They are a small guild who we agreed to help, the Moonlit Black Cats. Klein is here because I was dueling him. You are here because we decided to have some demonstration duels for them, but after I beat Klein and Asuna I'm pretty sure they just wanted to see me lose, so they had me call you. Liz is here because Asuna invited her to watch our duel."

"So you want to duel?" Nira says.

"Yes."

"With pleasure," Nira says.

"First strike, but try not to actually hit the other person and just stop right before because it would hurt a lot," Kirito says.

"Alright," Nira agrees and sends a duel request.

As the duel timer counts down, Nira comments, "This is rather pointless from a teaching perspective, I mean, I highly doubt they'll be able to follow at all. Not to mention we're both dual-wielders, a highly uncommon style almost nobody is able to use, so even if they were able to follow, it wouldn't help them much."

"As I said, I'm reasonably certain Asuna and Klein just want to see me lose, or at least come close."

"First strike does favor me, as the faster player. Well, we haven't actually dueled since the beta test, so this'll be fun," Nira says with a smile and draws her swords.

As the timer counts down, Akari walks over to Asuna, Klein and his guild, and the other guild and sits down.

"Good luck," Nira says.

"Good luck."

The timer hits 0 and both of them charge forward, a motion difficult to follow on its own.

Nira swings in a downward cross with both swords, swinging her right sword from top left to bottom right and her left sword from top right to bottom left, causing Kirito to dodge right to avoid the strike with the left sword and knock the right sword aside with a horizontal swing with his left sword from left to right, followed by a parallel swing with his left aimed at Nira's chest. It would have been closer to stomach on someone his height.

Nira steps back to avoid the attack and swings up with her right sword. Kirito parries the attack with a downward swing of his left sword and swings his right sword back across to the left with a forward step. Nira slows the swing down with her left sword by twisting it up with her wrist and steps back, moving her left hand to her right with the momentum of the block before swinging it back down right to left while swinging her right sword up right to left. With an upward swing of his right sword and a duck he knocks Nira's sword high while swinging forcefully left with his left sword, overcoming Nira's right sword's swing with sheer force.

Nira leaps back a couple meters to reset. The entire exchange took considerably less than 2 seconds.

The entire audience, except Akari—who had seen them duel before, and could actually follow the exchange... approximately—and Asuna—who had seen them both going all out—, lets out a mixture of gasps and 'wow's. Klein had never had the chance to pay attention to either of them going all out, since during boss fights he was busy ordering his guild and fighting.

"You've gotten even faster," Kirito comments.

"So have you," Nira responds before jumping (metaphorically) back into action.

Kirito brings his left sword to the right to swing. Nira swings downward with both swords in parallel. Kirito blocks with his right sword, using his superior strength to mostly block the double handed blow and swinging his left sword across from right to left, redirecting the strike downwards since both of Nira's swords were high.

Nira responds by jumping into the air, pushing with herself up further and into a flip by pushing down with her swords, starting to spin round to land facing Kirito's back. As Nira comes down, Kirito turns the remains of his right to left swing with his left sword into a spin, following with a long sweep from his right sword.

Nira crouches down as she falls, falling beneath the two blows and swings at Kirito's legs with a horizontal cross, swinging right sword from left to right and left sword from right to left, as she stands up.

Kirito jumps over the low swings and raises his swords for a down swing and Nira leans forward with her right shoulder, pushing into Kirito's left leg and forcing him to land unstably with most of his weight on his right leg. She uses the moment of poor balance to swing back across from left to right with her left sword at his side, his weight being on that side stopping him from dodging and his swords too high to block, stopping just before the attack hits and falling into a right shoulder roll to dodge his downward swings.

"I win," she says as she stands up from her roll.

"Forfeit," Kirito says to the duel system.

A 'winner' icon appears over Nira's head.

"Damn it, you were so much easier to hit when you were taller."

"I also have the advantage in landing a single hit since I'm faster but each hit is somewhat weaker. In the beta we fought to half-death, eliminating that advantage. Being short isn't exactly an advantage over all, even in a fight, but it does have its perks," Nira says.

The two sheathe their swords and the audience starts clapping.

The entire fight had lasted less than 6 seconds, 2 of which were them just looking at each other.

 **[500 words for 4 seconds of combat (plus some more but those weren't actually combat). You happy mernom? This is hard and I probably messed up somewhere and had some impossible motion (like a left to right swing with a sword that should be on the right already or whatever).]**

"That was amazing!" says the girl in the Moonlit Black Cats.

"I find it interesting how their duel lasted only a few seconds while my duel with Klein lasted over half a minute," Asuna says.

"Fights at low levels don't last long because nobody can block and even a half-assed swing will hit. Fights at mid to high level, especially between relatively evenly matched people last a decent time because everyone has good defense and there are exchanges of blows. Fights between them last seconds because while the exchanges happen, they just happen insanely fast," Akari says.

"Why didn't you use any sword skills?" asks the girl.

"Because, uh- what's your name?"

"Sachi," the girl says.

"I'm Nira. Anyway, for the purpose of this expiation I will break down sword skills into two categories, short single or double hit skills and long multi-hit skills. Both have their own reasons for not being used, however the biggest reason is in common between the two. Kirito and I have practically speaking the same skills. If I use a sword skill, I am locked into that path of motion. Kirito has memorized all the sword skills available to either of us at this point, as well as most of the skills available to other relatively common builds. This means Kirito knows exactly where I'll be for the duration of the skill, long enough for him to strike himself. This applies more to long skills than short skills. If I use [Horizontal], any player in the game may be able to predict the skill but that does not make it completely ineffective because it is fast and does not lock me in for long. It sacrifices flexibility for speed and power. If I use a long multi-hit skill, like [Deadly Sins]-"

"What's [Deadly Sins]?" one of the other members asks.

"Irrelevant, but it's a 7 hit [One-handed Sword] skill. The point is it is long. If I use a long multi-hit skill which can last several seconds, Kirito knows where I'll be the entire time, and even someone who doesn't know the exact motions can just jump back and avoid the attacks. As such, multi-hit skills only work against who are either stupid or very large. Non-humanoids and bosses mostly. Any humanoid will be able to avoid and likely counterattack, either during the skill or during the PMD—before you ask, PMD is [Post-Motion Delay], a freeze period which activates a short moment after a sword skill finishes—, and deal damage while you are defenseless. This is the first and greatest weakness of sword skills, and combat skills in general, in a duel. In short, they are predictable and they are inflexible, once you start, it is very difficult to stop and you suffer a penalty, which brings to the second reason, [Post-Motion Delay]. It activates shortly after you finish a skill and generally lasts anywhere between a small fraction of a second, like for [Horizontal], and a couple seconds, like for something like [Deadly Sins]. It activates at full length even if you cancel the skill. Following so far?"

She gets some nods.

"The first kind is alright in a slower duel, or if used well and knocks your opponent off-balance. Most monsters, humanoid or not, will be unable to counterattack in that time, and since it activates a moment after the skill you can move to block before then if they do, and so the boost in speed and power of the blow is useful. Our duel has one key features that makes the advantages null and the disadvantage huge. That is, we both move very fast. Especially compared to our [AGI] skills, so the sword skills do not give us a major boost of speed, so since our goal is a single hit and neither of us tends to break through defense with brute strength, it gives practically no advantage. That we move fast also amplifies the disadvantage. If your opponent attacks once every couple seconds, maybe striking twice in a row sometimes, then a fraction of a second isn't very big and boost in speed is huge. However if your opponent strikes multiple times per second, a fraction of a second of predictability plus a fraction of a second of immobility can be _immediately_ fatal, especially since our duel is until first strike. This is obviously not worth it when the sword skill provides nothing but an unneeded boost in strength."

"The second kind is going to result in an almost guaranteed loss in a duel against practically any opponent who isn't so stupid as to try to tank a multi-hit skill. They will step out of range and they will counterattack the moment the skill stops and you will be defenseless. Never use them against a humanoid enemy unless they are very large. They should reserved for dealing burst damage to bosses or stupid creatures, finishing or stunning them so they can't counterattack. If either of us used on them in the duel, it would be over before the skill even finished since we both know the exact motions of the skills for this exact reason. To counterattack during the skill against anyone who uses it against us, be it a player in a duel or a humanoid monster."

"So short skills should be used when you can be reasonably certain that the enemy can't quickly counterattack and long skills should only be used against large or stupid enemies and only for burst damage when it can stun the enemy or kill it?" Sachi confirms.

"Yes. There is one final reason for our specific case. We were trying not to actually _hit_ each other because that hurts like hell and instead stop our blows just before, which is _far_ more difficult with sword skills. There is one exception which I really shouldn't be telling you since you wouldn't be able to pull it off."

"What?"

Nira looks at Kirito, who nods.

"Combos. A combo is a chain of sword skills. Ordinarily, you are frozen after the skill. However that is not exactly true. You are not frozen, you simply can't make yourself move. But a sword skill can. If you can activate a sword skill in the brief moment between completion of sword skill and activation of PMD, you will effectively cancel the first PMD. This is called a cancel. If you can chain this together, you get a combo. Chaining short skills has all the power of a multi-hit skill with the two main disadvantages practically nullified; the PMD will simply be the PMD of the last skill you use; and you have the flexibility of shorter skills, choosing a new one at each step. However since you have only a short time to start your next skill, you are limited on the skills you can use after a given skill, so you still lack a good deal of flexibility, and it is easy to mess up."

"In most duels, a good combo will be an incredibly powerful tool, allowing you to chain powerful attacks while only suffering a short PMD at the end. In a duel like ours however, if we ever broke combo without a large advantage, we would still lose due to PMD. Even we would be unable to maintain a combo for an entire duel... _with just one sword_."

"So with both you could?" Klein asks. He knew about combos, however...

"With two swords you can chain combos to near infinity, position not only your next skill, but also the skill after that in each free period, giving you much more freedom with skills and much more leeway. _Don't try though._ You will cut off your own limbs and even if you don't, there is a reason why there aren't many dual-wielders."

"Can you demonstrate?" the leader of the Black Cats asks.

"I guess we could..." Nira says, realizing that it would probably involve the duel ending with one of them actually getting hit. A first strike duel in a safe zone meant that you would be healed almost immediately after being hit, but it wouldn't stop it from hurting.

Kirito sighs.

"I feel like I have a good chance of winning this, so let's go," he says.

The duel is practically a light show, streaks of light through the air trailing the blow and flashes of light with ever clash, accompanied by loud clangs of metal on metal. Strike met strike over and over and over again, several times per second. Even their own conscious brains could hardly follow the attacks and they were both running on autopilot. Strike after strike after strike. Over and over and over again.

Both of them was slowly losing HP from bad parries or blocks. The duel was likely to end with Nira getting to half HP (first strike duels end when someone reaches half HP even if nobody landed a proper hit) and Kirito having just ever so slightly more.

Strike, parry, deflect, block, strike, strike, dodge, parry, strike, strike.

An endless storm of light.

"The game must feel so abused," Akari comments.

Asuna glances at her. "What do you mean?"

"They're abusing the hell out of that mechanic with their unrelenting combos of arbitrary length," Akari answers, "Of course I don't blame them, in this death game anything goes, but I'm reasonably certain that Kayaba did not intend that to work that way. Though, once again, if Kayaba didn't intend it, all the more reason to do it."

"Oh, I see," Asuna says, without looking away from the fight this time.

A short while later, though those moments seemed to stretch on, Nira's HP hits 50% and Kirito wins... with like 54% HP himself, which means if time had run out it would have been a tie (within 5% of each other (as in like 5 HP if everyone had 100, not 5% of 50%, which would be 2.5%).

Both of them practically fall over. "My arms hurt," Nira whines at Akari.

"Should have thought of that before you decided to show off," Akari answers playfully.

It wasn't surprising that Nira's—and Kirito's—arms hurt. After all, sword skills or no, she did feel all those blocks and parries and the recoil from her own attacks being blocked or parried.

"Don't ever try to replicate that, you'll just hurt yourselves," Asuna says to the Black Cats.

"It happened to plenty of people during the beta test. When you see that, it seems very appealing to be able to do it yourself. They ended up with missing limbs or just dying outright, which wasn't a big deal," Akari adds.

"Oh don't worry, it seems completely impossible," the leader says.

"Hey Kirito," Nira says.

"Yeah?"

"That was fun. Well, the first one anyway-"

"You're just salty that you lost."

"-but the second one too. We should duel again sometime soon."

"You're on whenever."

"Akari!" Nira calls.

Akari walks over. "Yeah?"

"Help me up," Nira says with a playful smile on her face.

"Oh no way, you brought this on yourself," she says teasingly, before extending a hand to Nira a second later anyway.

* * *

 **Mernom complained about the lack of epic fights. I hope that qualifies (the first one, I mean).**

 **And I really am sorry that half the chapter is a literal lecture. I got a little carried away and before I knew it, the chapter had reached my usual chapter length, so I'm ending it here and I'll just continue in the next chapter.**

 **Also, this officially qualifies as my third longest story, in chapters (fourth in words). If you count my first 3 'stories' which were all one actual story in 3 parts as 1. And I'm currently maintaining an average rate of a chapter every two days, which I'd say is good enough, even if it is unscheduled.**

 **Thanks for reading, please tell me what you thought and follow/favorite!**


	8. Chapter 8

**8 chapters. Which is like 6 more than normal for me.**

 **On an unrelated note, anyone interested in Kerbal Space Program should check out DasValdez and/or EJ_SA on Twitch.**

 **Truly sorry that this took so long. It just sat there at around 500 words for a few days before I sat down and wrote it.**

* * *

11 months into the game, the clearers had finally reached and beaten the 50th boss, though not without casualties. 8 deaths, many more wounded and deciding to take a break from the front lines. Kirito had gotten the LAB, a black longsword called [Elucidator], likely one of the top 5 swords in the game, and the best of its class. Which wasn't surprising, since it was the LAB from the latest boss and it was a milestone boss.

With the passing of the half way point, moral was at an all time high and a month later, they had reached the 56th floor. By the second Christmas in ACO, The clearing group had reached floor 63.

* * *

"Another set of holidays spent without sis or Hina..." Nira mutters sadly. She wanted to cry. Instead she just buries her face in Akari and hugs her.

Akari hugs her back. "At this rate, we'll be out before next year's."

Both of them look up at the same time as they both receive messages. Nira sluggishly opens her menu and checks the message. It was from Asuna. An invitation to the large house on the forested 40th floor that Kirito and Asuna had bought. It was large enough that it could be hardly considered a house. Nira and Akari knew they were planning something with it, not just living in it, but they didn't yet know what.

An invitation to a Christmas party.

* * *

Nira and Akari look up at the large building, which looked like some odd cross of a log cabin and a mansion. They approached and knocked on the door, which was shortly opened by Asuna wearing a tan wool sweater, a dark brown skirt that goes down to just above her knees, and thick leggings of the same color. Over the sweater she was wearing a white apron with red designs sown into it.

"Well, come in you two," she says. The two walk into the building.

In the large living room there were quite a few people. The Black Cats were here, as well as Klein and his guild. Kirito was obviously there. Liz, Argo, Agil, Silica, who Nira and Akari hardly knew, and Heathcliff, surprisingly enough, were also both there. Really they only knew Asuna, Kirito, and Liz well of the entire player base. They also knew Klein, Agil, and Argo fairly well. There also quite a few people they either didn't know at all or vaguely recognized.

"Would you like some hot chocolate?" she asks as she starts to head off to the kitchen.

"Yes please," Akari says.

"Both of you?"

"Yes," Akari answers.

"Okay. And also, you two should really change out of your combat gear once in a while," Asuna says.

Nira unequips her swords, backup daggers which were really Akari's hand-me-downs because she had yet to use them once, throwing daggers, all other manner of weapons, and coat, equipping a black wool turtleneck sweater.

"Happy?"

"Better than nothing, I suppose. And holy hell you have a lot of weapons on you. That goes for you too Akari, at least take off your weapons."

"Whatever you say, milady," Akari says sarcastically with a slight bow and unequips her bow, arrows, dagger, and all other weapons she has on her.

Asuna sighs and heads off to the kitchen.

The two head over towards Kirito and Heathcliff, who were talking about something.

"Nice to see you two made it even with the last minute invitation," Kirito says.

"Well, we would have probably spent the day sulking otherwise," Nira says as they sit down.

"Still trying to get Kirito and Asuna to join your guild?" Akari asks Heathcliff.

"Trying once in a while can't hurt. You two are also welcome in the KBO if you ever want to join," he replies.

"We'll pass," Nira says.

"I'm not surprised."

Nira whispers something to Akari, who nods. "How about this; if you can show that you're the strongest player, we'll join your guild," Nira says.

"Strongest player or strongest player _other than you_?" Heathcliff asks.

"Strongest player, including me," Nira says.

"If we have a tournament with people having to pay to watch, we could also get a huge amount of money," Kirito suggests.

"If we're going to do a tournament, then if _I_ win, I get an extra part of the money from you in exchange for joining your guild if I lose," Nira says to Heathcliff.

"With the most powerful guild in the game, I admit I am not in the slightest need of col, so that is fine. You can have all of the tournament proceeds, if you win. Or whatever would otherwise have gone to me and the KBO," Heathcliff says.

"Just the three of us or anybody who wants to?" Kirito asks.

"Let's do everybody who wants to, though I doubt it will be many people, since to make it fair it would need to be half death mode, and that means pain most people probably won't be willing to experience, even if we offered prizes for making it to some place or whatever," Nira says.

"Are you going to compete?" Heathcliff asks Akari.

"I suppose I will. I'm probably the strongest player who isn't one of you three."

"You think you can beat Asuna?" Kirito asks. "After all, you mostly act support, which doesn't bode well for fighting 1v1."

"I could beat Asuna without touching my bow," Akari says confidently just as Asuna comes from the kitchen, carrying two cups of cocoa. She had removed her apron.

"You mentioned me?" Asuna asks as she gives the cocoa to the two.

"Akari was saying she could beat you without touching her bow," Kirito says.

Before Asuna says anything, Nira says, "We're planning to have a tournament, so you can find out then."

"You're on Akari, you're on," Asuna says with a competitive smile.

Akari holds a hand to her heart and says in a tone of mock offense to Nira, "You doubt my skill?"

Nira smiles teasingly. "Maaaaybe."

Heathcliff looks at the exchange with a small smile.

"Speaking of fighting," Kirito says, "there's a Christmas boss that will spawn on the 35th floor. Supposedly, according to rumors gathered by Argo from players and NPCs, it can resurrect somebody... I highly doubt it, but it is a possibility worth fighting an event boss for. Do you two want to come? Or you, Heathcliff."

"Sure, we'll go," Akari answers immediately.

"I suppose I shall as well," Heathcliff says.

"Well, the 5 of us should be more than enough, but it can't really hurt to have more people," Kirito says.

"There's any number of ways it could hurt to have more people. Theoretically, it would be purely harmful to have someone who was unarmed and helpless, as they would make it harder to know what the boss will do, and they would just be likely to die. Depending on the type of boss, having more people would hardly have any benefit. For example, a small boss with AOE attacks," Nira says.

"Bringing people increases their chance of getting hurt, so if we can handle it without getting significantly hurt ourselves, it is the best choice," she adds.

"Klein and his guild are strong and would greatly speed up the process, and they can teleport out just as much as we can," Kirito says.

"I guess if they want to, I don't mind," Nira says, "But organizing a full on raid is pointless and dangerous."

"The boss spawns at midnight exactly and, even though we should go there a little earlier to beat the DDA, that means that we have plenty of time," Kirito says.

"Enjoy the party," Asuna says, "There'll be food soon."

"Did you cook it?" Nira asks hopefully.

"Mostly. I had a little help," Asuna answers.

"I can't wait!" Nira says happily with a big smile.

Asuna and Akari chuckle.

A short while later Asuna and Kirito head off to be proper hosts, leaving them with Heathcliff.

"Are you two always together?" Heathcliff asks.

After a moment of thinking, Nira says, "Since the start of ACO, almost literally yes."

"Almost?" Heathcliff asks.

"I can't think of any examples, but I'm pretty sure we've split up at some point or another," Nira answers.

"I'm surprised that I've never seen you two fight. Normally happens to people who spend all their time together," Heathcliff says.

The two just shrug.

"Have you ever done kendo?" Heathcliff asks Nira.

"Yes. Pretty well, if I may so myself," Nira answers.

"Second place in the national championship last year?" Heathcliff asks.

"What makes you think that?" Nira asks, hiding her surprise.

"That person never revealed anything about themselves aside their height and body build. Those alone, however, are enough, when combined with your skill with a sword, to make it seem quite probable that it was you. Even the fighting style has its similarities, though most of that is hidden by dual wielding here in ACO," Heathcliff says.

"It's a good guess... yes, you're right, that was me," Nira says.

"ACO is fair for all, in some sense. Any child can be just as strong as any adult. Due to this, your power here is impressive, but does seem possible. Unlikely yes, but not impossible. In the real world, however, that doesn't hold, which makes your placing—a feat impressive in its own right—all the more impressive," Heathcliff says.

"Practice."

"Someone of your age should have school and the like, no? Which would, especially since you obviously spend a considerable amount of time on video games, leave little time for practice."

"Homeschooling. Not going to school now has the other great advantage of not being behind by however long it takes us to get out of here _when_ we do get out of here," Nira answers.

She then adds, "Can we talk about something other than the 'real' world now?"

Heathcliff nods. It had become generally accepted not to ask about the real world, and while asking about kendo may not have been outside the acceptable, it did get there.

"May I ask why you said 'real' world so sarcastically?" Heathcliff asks.

"Death here is real. Pain here is real. Every feeling, every sight is real. These things may not exist in the 'real world', but they exist here. Have you noticed? That there are no polygons. When you touch somebody's hand, or lay on the ground and stare at the sky, you can't tell that it isn't real. Even things that don't exist in our world look like real creatures. So what makes this world not real? That it was created by someone? There are plenty of people who think the 'real' world was also created by someone. Or is it that once we reach the top it will be destroyed? That this world is doomed to die? Because the 'real' world is also doomed to die, in its own ways. Entropic heat death, for example. Is it that something happening in this world, aside from death, has no direct effect on the 'real' world? Because the same goes in the other direction," Nira says.

"The only thing that makes people say that our world is the 'real' world is because it is _our_ world. The world that works how we expect things to work. The world we're used to. Anything else is some sort of fake, and only _our_ world is the real one."

"I hadn't really thought about it that way. That said, that attitude can hardly be good for fighting spirit. We cannot stay here forever. Our muscles will atrophy and our bodies will die. That's what makes our world real. That even while we're here, we continue to exist there. When we logout from this world, we are gone from it. It can no longer touch us. Nothing in that world will harm us directly. When we enter this world, we simply become vulnerable in our world. Even as we remain eternally in whatever form we entered into this world with, our real bodies die slowly in hospitals across Japan. There's only so long before they give up on us and pull the plug," Heathcliff says.

"I see your point, but that doesn't change that this world is real."

"Perhaps, but the fact remains that no matter if we prefer this world, or if we don't care, we still most leave or we will die," Heathcliff says.

Nira starts to say something before Akari says, "Enough with the aggressive agreement already. We all agree that we need to get out of here."

After that, they turned their talks to more pleasant topics than the time limit they had on clearing the game. Like Asuna's cooking.

* * *

As midnight approached, the 11 (Kirito, Asuna, Nira, Akari, Heathcliff, and Fuurinkazan) left to go after the boss, Asuna leaving Agil, Lisbeth, and Sachi in charge.

They teleported to the 35th floor and trudged through the [Forest of Wandering] to the boss's location.

Just as they were about to reach it, the DDA showed up. They had been followed, since none of them had particularly bothered checking.

"Step aside. The boss is ours," the leader of the DDA group of several parties yells.

Nira smirks. "And how _exactly_ is it yours?" she calls.

Before they can answer, Klein says, "How about you 5 go kill the boss and we make sure this lot of buffoons doesn't get in your way?"

Before Kirito can object, Akari says, "Thank you Klein."

Kirito is about to say something again and Akari says, "Let's go, we have a boss to fight."

The group of 5 turn towards the boss and the DDA group leader yells, "Where do you think you're going!?" He charges after them with his men, but they are stopped by Fuurinkazan.

* * *

The boss fight had ended up being surprisingly easy. Easy enough that any one of them could most likely have beat it on their own. Since Heathcliff was able to keep the boss focused on him and his near-unbreakable defense most of them time and the rest of the time Akari kept him stunned, blinded, or distracted, Asuna, Kirito, and Nira were able to completely melt the boss's HP. The boss died in minutes, with Kirito scoring the LAB.

"Well, revival item or not?" Akari asks.

"[Divine Stone of Returning Soul]. It can revive someone within roughly 10 seconds of death," Kirito says.

"Not surprising that it isn't an actual revival item, since the NerveGear can hardly bring someone back to life after it kills them. Especially if it has been removed from their head and they have been buried," Heathcliff says.

"I think we should go check on Klein," Asuna says.

"That sounds like a good idea."

As the party returns to Klein, they find a him and his guild resting in the snow.

"How'd it go?" he asks.

"It didn't put up much of a fight. Dropped an item that can be used to revive someone up to 10 seconds after death," Kirito says.

* * *

They return back to Asuna and Kirito's house and the party continues long into the morning. Interestingly enough, you can actually get drunk of the alcoholic beverages, which some people—such as Nira and Akari—found odd, and others didn't as they got themselves drunk.

At some point Nira fell asleep—which may have had something to do with accidentally drinking an alcoholic beverage instead of whatever she planned due to a prank by Argo, something that nearly got her killed by Akari—and Akari took her to one of the many rooms in the house, per Asuna's instructions, since she planned to go back to the place they stayed in originally. To be totally fair to Argo, she didn't actually do much, Nira was just about ready to fall asleep on her own.

* * *

The next afternoon, when Nira wakes up, the first words she said as she clutched her head were, "I'm going to kill Argo."

* * *

 **Once again, sorry this took so long. I really am. Sorry I took so long for a shorter chapter.**

 **I would have made this longer, but I'd rather get this out today rather than who-knows-when and it's fucking late (and I slept poorly last night) and I have a headache and just want to curl up in my blankets.**

 **Thanks for reading and please review or something like that... I'm too tired to write this properly.**


	9. Chapter 9

**Sorry the last chapter took so long.**

 **I realize that the probability of their being no fights among Kirito, Nira, and Heathcliff till the very end is very, very low. However any given way I write it has the same probability, just some are perceived as roughly equivalent and thus higher chance.**

 **Anyone who complains about [Vorpal Strike] being overused or overpowered, it requires a [One-handed Sword] skill of 950 to unlock.**

* * *

Nira sits down and wipes her forehead with her sleeve.

"You're getting better at this," Akari comments.

"So are you," Nira says.

"You're still better," Akari says.

By 'this', they meant cheating. Breaking rules built into the game. Like having sword skills move faster than they should or curve, that sort of thing. Breaking rules supposedly hardcoded into the game with shear willpower. Obviously possibly, I mean, what else could you expect **[actually, the possibility of this shouldn't surprise those of you who've head the Alicization arc, given that I've hinted at it in several other ways. Or if you've watched/read Accel World. That should give you a pretty big hint]**?

It would be a major advantage against anyone, anything even, but against players like Heathcliff and Kirito, both of whom had memorized the exact specifics of almost every sword skill she should be able to use—since they knew what skills she had, the one-handed sword and rapier ones (you could use most 'sword skills' with most swords, they were just ineffective with an unsuitable weapon)—, it would be even more of an advantage since someone who doesn't know the skill defends by being ready for anything, but someone who _does_ know the skill, defends from the skill and exactly from the skill.

Akari planned to use this to fight Asuna.

Nira had discovered this when she was just trying to figure out something to give her an edge. She decided the best way would be to see if she could change some of the things all the high levels who understood the games took for granted. Tried a few things, eventually coming to sword skills and managing to change them.

"I guess I'm good enough to use it as a surprise attack," Nira says.

"And in the end, there's always your [Unique Skill] to fall back on."

"I really don't feel like using that to win if I don't have to," Nira says.

"Heathcliff will use his and I wouldn't be surprised if Kirito had his own."

"I'll use it if I have to."

"Let's take a break. Maybe we should find out what else in this game that we take for granted can be broken with willpower."

"It feels so... disappointing, in a way. All it takes to break through is to believe you can. Believe in yourself and you can do anything, huh?" Nira says.

"Maybe not _any_ thing. Who knows, maybe you just need to believe harder to do other things. Maybe I'll be able to beat Kirito," Akari says.

The two were in a clearing in a forest. It used to be just a random patch of woods, however the trees had all been cut down in their practice in a small area around them.

"We've certainly changed the landscape a little," Nira comments.

"Maybe we'll wake up some sort of forest guardian if we keep chopping trees down," Akari says.

"Oh it'll totally happen. Just because you said it, it will," Nira says.

She walks over to tree. "Watch, it'll happen the moment I cut this tree down."

She swings here sword with a slightly slanted [Horizontal], cutting clean through the tree. The tree topples over.

A few seconds of silence before they hear a rumbling a little ways off.

"I wasn't being serious!" Nira cries out in exasperation.

"Troll engine working overtime," Akari says jokingly.

"So it seems," Nira agrees.

A tree monster lumbers into the clearing. It moved on a mass of roots with trees for arms and a face like a stereotypical spooky tree with glowing yellow eyes.

"We don't need loot from it right?" Nira asks.

"Not on this floor, no," Akari agrees.

"Alright then..." Nira says, conjuring a crimson crystal from her inventory.

She tosses it toward the creature. "Burn."

If it was an on-level fire crystal, it would have been unable to light the creature on the fire, however since they were 30 floors before the floor she got the crystal on, the monster bursts into flame once the crystal which lodges in a crack in the bark blazes into flames.

It screams and swings its flaming limbs at them however it only gets two missed swings before it shatters.

* * *

Several weeks after the Christmas party where they planned the tournament, on January 15th, 2024, the tournament was being held. They had amassed a ridiculous 4000 people watching. This is out of the 7200 or so people currently still remaining. They had a total of 46 contestants (not many people wanted to have half-death duals, but some were lured in by prize money). The tournament was relatively simple. Everybody is paired with a random opponent and the loser eliminated. If there is an odd number of people, a random person sits out. This is repeated. Once there are 8 or less contestants left, it switches to double elimination (two losses and you are eliminated). Ties were 'wins' for both people.

The contestants included, notably, Heathcliff, Kirito, Nira, Asuna, Akari, Klein, Lind (DDA's leader), Diabel, and Agil.

This means the rounds are: One round of 23 matches, leaving 23 people, then a second of 11 matches leaving 12 people, then a third with 6 matches, leaving 6 people. Then double elimination.

The arena on the 50th floor had room enough for 4 matches to be fought at once.

The first round involved notably, Nira fighting Klein, Asuna fighting Diabel, Heathcliff against Lind, and Kirito fighting Kibaou. Agil fought a tank from the front lines. Akari fought against an archer from the front lines and made a game of trying to shoot his arrows out of the air with her own.

She failed miserably most of her tries but managed to actually do it twice. She then shot his bow of his hands and charged him with her dagger, pinning him down and making him surrender instead of suffering the pain of her actually brining him to half-health. Being not an overly prideful idiot, he surrenders.

Kirito had made the same offer to Kibaou after disarming him with his first strike and then stabs him through the heart with his second when Kibaou refuses.

Nira fights Klein with a single sword to give him a chance, and doesn't attack for the first 20 seconds, only defending from his attacks. Since she was a dual-wielder who plays by 'a good offense is the best defense', he did actually manage to land a grazing hit on her before his 20 seconds were up and he found out just how good her offense was, first hand. After he was disarmed—like got his arm cut off—in several seconds by Nira's almost impossibly fast strikes, he surrenders and swears a couple dozen times. He was high enough level to get the skill that reduces pain in combat, but getting hand cut off was still painful, even through it.

Heathcliff against Lind didn't last long. Lind wore himself away on Heathcliff's near-impregnable defense and then was defeated by a [Vorpal Strike] catching him by surprise, since Heathcliff was one of the three people who had actually unlocked the skill and since during boss fights where they went all out people were hardly paying attention to them, people didn't know of the skill, so while it looks at first like a lunging attack, the attack has twice the reach of the sword being used, a crimson spear of light extending from the front of crimson coated sword at the same speed at which it itself moves. Lind had dodged back, far enough to avoid Heathcliff's sword, but not far enough to avoid the [Vorpal Strike], which struck him through the heart.

Asuna against Diabel was the fairest match, though not particularly fair. Diabel was a good tank and used his shield well, protecting himself from Asuna landing any good hits for some time. But with every little hit, his defense got just a little weaker and the pain built until Asuna unleashed a combo of powerful lunges that finally broke through his defense.

Agil simply overpowered his opponent with heavy swings of his large axe.

The next round there were no interesting matches. Nira fought an archer and just stood still and knocked his arrows out of the air with one of her swords until he eventually just surrendered. Akari had disarmed her opponent with a shot to the tip of his sword and then through him to the ground and told him to surrender. Asuna's repeated lightning fast strikes quickly overwhelmed her opponent and disarmed him, making him surrender. Heathcliff simply deflected all of his opponents attacks, something he would have been able to keep up ad infinitum if his opponent hadn't surrendered. Kirito had shattered his opponents sword on the first strike, in response to which his opponent surrendered. Agil had also defeated his opponent by knocking her weapon out of her hands.

A final elimination round that went similarly left them with Nira, Akari, Kirito, Asuna, Heathcliff, and Agil.

* * *

The final rounds were done 1 by 1 with a commentator. Silica, Lizbeth, and Klein were commentating. Klein was there as an expert on combat. He was stronger than Agil and Klein against Asuna was a roughly fight.

The first round was Asuna against Akari.

"You ready to show just how you can 'beat me without touching your bow'?" Asuna asks.

"Of course I am," Akari says with a smile, drawing her dagger and crouching down into a low stance.

Asuna draws her rapier and gets in her stance as the duel timer counts down.

"As the result of a bold claim, the strongest archer won't be using her bow in this fight," Silica says cheerfully, this unsurprisingly got a lot of surprise from the watching crowds.

The 4 other contestants sat roughly together and watched.

The timer hit 0 and both combatants charged forward.

Asuna lunged forward and her blow was knocked aside by Akari's dagger, scraping along it and missing Akari by an inch. Akari struck back, lunging at Asuna's feet and rolling to her feet behind Asuna, who almost completely dodged the attack and spun round, stabbing at Akari as she finished her roll and grazing.

They continued to exchange grazing strikes, continuously remaining at roughly equal HP, close enough for a tie if time ran out, with Akari having slightly more. Everyone watched, enthralled by the fight, as the commentators provided useless commentary.

As 2 minutes and the time limit approached, the Asuna and Akari were at 71% and 73% HP respectively. If as the time runs out, players are within 5% HP, it would be a tie.

Akari thinks, _The easiest way for me to win here would be to use the duel system. If use a suicide attack timed well enough, I can land a hit strong enough to put Asuna low enough that I win but have time run out before she can counterattack. Feels scummy, but I'm not about lose after what said._

So as time remaining approaches 0 and Asuna says, "Beat me, huh?"

As time reaches less than 1 second remaining, Akari jumps forward, cutting a shallow cut across Asuna's side. Asuna stabs at Akari's heart, however the purple safe zone barrier stops her strike just before it hits. The duel ends with Akari having 6% more HP than Asuna and winning the duel. A winner icon appears over Akari's head.

"Yes, beat you," Akari says with a smug smile.

"You say that like you utterly defeated me or something. If this wasn't a duel, I'd be mostly fine and you'd be dead," Asuna says with a 'hmph'.

"But if it wasn't a duel, I would have used my bow," Akari says with a sly smile.

The next fight was Agil against Kirito.

Kirito challenged himself by not allowing himself to dodge, instead making himself parry, block, or deflect all of Agil's heavy attacks. This left him with little time to counterattack and so the duel lasted a while, but ended with Agil's defeat.

The final fight of the first round in the second batch was Nira against Heathcliff.

"We finally get to see it! The fight between 2 of the 3 players accepted already accepted as the strongest!" Silica says. Lizbeth and Klein don't comment that they'd already seen Kirito and Nira fight before.

"Good luck," Nira says and sends a duel request.

"Good luck," Heathcliff says and accepts her duel request.

The timer reaches 0 and they both smile. Heathcliff braces himself.

Nira practically vanishes, colliding with Heathcliff's shield in a double-sword strike.

Even as her swords bounce back she kicks at his shield with a [Martial Arts] skill, highly useful since it had a lot of blunt force.

Before her foot even hits his shield, the she starts to strike with her swords, beginning an unrelenting combo of kicks and sword skills. Heathcliff braces his shield into the ground and pushes against the onslaught.

"I certainly wouldn't want to be in Heathcliff's place, but then again, I don't have his defense. An unending onslaught against an impregnable defense. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object!" Lizbeth yells.

Heathcliff shoves forward with his shield and swings his sword at blinding speed, forcing Nira to jump back to avoid the attack, granting him a moment of respite.

Despite his near-perfect defense, it was still only near-perfect, and tanking that barrage of sword skills had damaged him significantly and was starting to wear on his stamina. He could keep it up for a while, but not forever.

"I guess you're not the only one who's gotten stronger and faster since the last time you two dueled," Asuna comments to Kirito.

"Your legendary defense lives up to expectations," Nira compliments.

"As does your offense. You are far more difficult to defend against than most bosses," Heathcliff responds.

"I'm just barely getting started," Nira says with a smile.

Nira kicks off the ground and attacks Heathcliff again, striking over and over again. Every time Heathcliff counterattacked, Nira would move slightly and avoid or knock it down. Heathcliff was forced to stay behind his shield and as such unable to properly attack.

He slams his shield into the ground and it glows with a bright flash of light, blinding Nira and forcing her to dodge back. He manages to graze her left arm as she jumps back.

"While 'a good offense is the best defense' might not be true, I will admit that the best offense is a good defense," Heathcliff says as Nira uses her superior agility to distance herself from Heathcliff as she regains her sight.

"The best defense seems to be a pretty good offense as well," Nira replies.

Nira's HP was still practically full and stopped draining from battle healing (it didn't actually recover HP in duels). Heathcliff's HP was at about 90%.

At this rate, Nira would win when time ran out, but she didn't feel satisfied winning by duel mechanics. If she gets his HP to half before time runs out that would be satisfactory, even if it is through this method.

 _Is it though? Don't I want to_ win _? A proper victory. At least a single strike. Break through his defense at least_ once _, if nothing else. No holds barred. No holding back. Time to go all out._ Almost _all out._

Heathcliff notices that he was losing, and if he didn't change his strategy to something more aggressive, he would lose.

Nira runs forward activating a charging sword skill with her right sword, forcing herself to go faster than the skill normally goes, just before hitting Heathcliff, she forces the skill to a halt and throws herself to side, carrying herself to his left side with a sword skill, before swinging with a [Horizontal] and twisting the blade to avoid the minimal block the Heathcliff did, planning for the skill to go where it should. He jumps back avoid, barely, and is forced off balance as Nira moves forward, already activating another skill the moment the other one finishes.

She continues to move to the side, her movements accelerating more and more, despite sword skills supposedly moving at a speed dependent only on the skill and the users stats.

Her attacks were no longer directed to break through his defense by shear force. Instead, she was dancing around him with a speed that not even Asuna could match, striking repeatedly.

It felt to him like being attacked by someone with many, many more swords than just 2. It felt like he was being struck with more than 2 blades at some instants.

Heathcliff activates [Vorpal Strike] to force Nira to dodge side ways in the opposite direction from which she had been already going, followed by a shield bash skill in a combo, breaking Nira's rhythm. He pushes forward, stabbing forward with the sharp point on the base of his shield with a combat skill from [Divine Blade], his unique skill. Nira dodges under it and lunges forward striking at his shield arm as he swings his sword down at her just before the PMD kicks in.

Instead of avoiding the attack, she sacrifices her left hand in order to severe his shield arm.

Her left sword and Heathcliff's shield fall to the ground as she jumps back, throwing the shield far from Heathcliff in the process, though mostly on accident. Heathcliff winces at the pain of losing his arm, even with the pain dampening skill.

Nira grits her teeth and swears.

The two stand facing each other, each now wielding one sword.

Both of them had [Battle Healing], which acted quickly to close the wounds, so neither of them were losing HP now.

 _Well, he relies on his shield more than I rely on my second sword, so this should be in my favor,_ Nira thinks. That reasoning was also why she sacrificed her arm in the first place.

Nira practically teleports forward and swings her sword. Without two swords, a combo of sword skills was risky, even with the ability to use willpower to warp reality and extend times, so she was mostly not using sword skills.

Heathcliff matched her blows in most cases, and the only ones which got through were glancing blows.

 _On the other hand, no skill combos and different balance with just one sword,_ Nira thinks, _Well, no risk no reward. Might as well try._

Her sword lights up with a sword skill, followed by another and another and another, chaining simple skills together with precision and speed Heathcliff was unable to match. She struck faster and faster once more, adjusting to using just one sword, and this time, Heathcliff didn't have a shield to weather the infinite storm of blows. The blows came slower than with two swords, but defense was much harder for Heathcliff without his shield and one he was being pushed back, blows getting past his defense and cutting through armor, clothes, and flesh alike, forcing him to keep moving backwards to avoid.

Heathcliff kicks out, an attack Nira blocks with the her left arm (no hand, but the arm was still there) and which makes wince in pain, to break through Nira's combo and strikes with his own skill. A heavy swing.

Nira's PMD wears off in time for her to jump back and into the air fast enough to avoid the attack. Heathcliff was in range of her [Vorpal Strike], so when she used it, he didn't find it surprising or unnatural, moving back just enough to avoid the skill and ready to move forward during the PMD since there were few skills one could combo with [Vorpal Strike] and none of them were practical in a duel.

Which is why when the spear of crimson light doesn't stop at twice the blades length but continues forward a short distance further, Heathcliff's eyes widen and he fails to react in time and the skill impales him through the chest.

Using the moment he didn't move in order to combo with a long multi-hit (she needed only the first strike and knew it would finish him) which could be used after [Vorpal Strike] because it started with the sword extended, she spins round and cuts into his side. She cancels the rest of the skill. The duel was over.

"Impossible," Kirito says.

"What is?" Asuna asks.

"That combo of hers with one sword should have failed many times. Her sword skills throughout moved faster than they should have, not to mention _speeding up_ and changing direction, if ever so slightly. And most importantly, [Vorpal Strike] goes exactly twice the length of the sword. Heathcliff should have been out of range."

He looks at Akari, who just shrugs because while she knew, she planned to his it against him so it was better if he didn't know she knew.

The 'victor' icon appears over her head and their wounds and HP heal.

"Well fought," Heathcliff says.

"It was fun, if a bit painful," Nira says.

Nira walks over to her sword and picks it up, sheathing both swords.

She finally starts to hear the crowd which she had completely blocked out, ignoring everything but her opponent.

"I find it is much easier to overwhelm someone if defending for them takes roughly the same as attack for you, in other words, someone with a sword. Really should have thought that through," Nira says.

"How did you extend the reach of [Vorpal Strike]? I'm certain I had moved out of its range," Heathcliff asks.

"Secret," Nira says with a smile. "I'll tell you after the end of the tournament."

* * *

The second round of fights featured Agil against Heathcliff, Asuna against Nira, and Kirito against Akari.

Agil was unable to break through Heathcliff's defense and lost when Heathcliff bashed up his axe and defeated him with [Vorpal Strike], a skill which had already claimed several matches in the tournament. The skills reach was a very useful feature, however the speed and power, especially speed, were also things to be reckoned with. The tip of the light spear moved at twice the speed of the sword tip, which already moved at the speed of a top-end lunging skill, meaning that the skill was incredibly difficult to dodge if you didn't recognize the pre-motion and position, which, since nobody but Heathcliff, Nira, and Kirito, practically nobody knew. Akari knew it. Asuna knew it approximately. For everybody else, they just had the grand total of 3 times (4 including that time) they had seen the skill used. He was eliminated.

Asuna and Nira stood, facing each other.

Nira draws one sword and sends a duel request.

"You're going easy on me?" Asuna says with a hint of annoyance.

"Sorry, but I'm really too tired to actually go all out," Nira says.

"And so you're handicapping yourself?"

"Yep," Nira says.

Asuna growls and gets into a stance. Nira mimics it.

As the timer hits 0, they both charged forward, Nira using her sword like a rapier, something it wasn't strictly designed for, but could do.

While Nira was faster than Asuna and was faster and more precise with getting into position for skills so she could better combo, in the end she wasn't a rapier user and didn't really know how to use one well, leading to a surprising even fencing match.

Eventually, Nira's HP drops to 70% and she leaps back.

"Noticed that you don't actually know how to use a rapier and that your speed and precision will only take you so far?" Asuna says.

"Yes," Nira says with a nod.

"Lightning Flash, would you like to see the [Lightning Slash]?" Nira asks.

"What?" Asuna asks, since she couldn't very well make out the words Nira says from the distance.

"Never mind, I was making a pun on your nickname and the name of sword skill," Nira says.

"Oh," Asuna says and charges forward using [Flashing Penetrator], a ludicrously fast charging skill.

Nira uses [Vorpal Strike], timed perfectly to clash with the skill, stopping Asuna's skill and making her stumble. She is unable to capitalize on the long cooldown.

"Did you and Heathcliff just agree to make fun of everyone by using only that skill outside of combos?" Asuna asks.

"Not that I recall," Nira says.

"Now, let me show you the [Lightning Slash]," Nira adds.

"Very funny," Asuna says sarcastically.

Nira practically appears in front of her, sword held high and angled for a 60° swing.

The sword glows blue and moves at lightning speed in the shape of a lightning bolt. A 3-hit skill.

Asuna manages to slow it down and step back.

Nira slashes through her stomach with [Uppercut], whose starting position matched almost exactly with the end of [Lightning Slash].

Asuna lets out a silent cry before Nira finishes the duel with the [Martial Arts] skill [Embracer] (the skill Kirito killed Kuradeel with in the canon).

"I hate you," Asuna mutters.

"Love you too," Nira says.

The final fight of the round was Akari against Kirito.

Akari holds her bow with 3 arrows ready (the game didn't let you draw during a duel timer) as the timer gets to 0. She draws the bow and the arrows light up with blue light. She aims nearly straight up—to much confusion of Kirito and the audience's part—and fires. The arrows shoot off so fast that they looked more like streaks of blue light, which fades.

She then begins to fire at Kirito, who cuts them out of the air or dodges them, approaching her.

She puts her bow on her back and quickly draws her dagger as Kirito gets close.

 _13..._

She parries a strike, dodging around him and backing up as she blocked and dodges his attacks, counterattacking with her dagger with warped sword skills.

 _7..._

She continues backing up, moving in circles. Kirito wasn't moving particularly aggressively, keeping back and playing safe.

 _3..._

Akari reverses direction and swipes at Kirito with a skill. Dagger skills had near-zero PMD.

He swipes at her and she dodges back. Kirito advances and moves where she was just standing.

 _0..._

Akari thinks as the arrows she shot up come down on Kirito's position.

He hears their whistle in time to dodge, however since he was moving forward he is forced to dodge towards her.

She uses [Quick Strike], a dagger skill which involves moving past your target very quickly and slashing their side, and redirects the skill just enough to let her hit him after he thought he dodged. His HP drops a small hunk before he spins around.

"You actually managed to aim those arrows, time when they would come down, and put me where you needed me moving in the right direction to pull that off. I'm impressed. And tempted to just give you the win for making that win," Kirito says.

"Thank you, though the idea was that I'd actually be able to win with that, so it didn't fully work."

Kirito gets into a low stance and Akari leaps back, grabbing her bow and drawing it, since she had no intention of fighting Kirito with blades. Holding him off for 15 seconds when he was being passive? Yes. Fighting? No.

Kirito charges forward and Akari fires and jumps back, keeping herself as far from Kirito as she can while shooting repeatedly. 3 arrows at a time, as fast as she could.

Accurate shots wouldn't be enough. It doesn't matter where a single shot goes, Kirito would most likely cut it down and the only places he would have trouble with were the ones where he could easily dodge.

Thus her only avenue for victory was to overwhelm him and hope he messes up.

Unfortunately, all the arrows would be not only coplanar, but collinear from his perspective, meaning no matter how many arrows she shoots, she'll always be able to cut a single shot down with a single swing. Theoretically, practically it is difficult for him to do that and since it is accuracy, not shooting speed, she sacrifices (mostly) to shoot more arrows at once, it was worth it.

Unfortunately for Akari, Kirito was faster than her moving backwards, and so she lost.

* * *

The next round featured Akari losing to Nira. In the sense that who shoots the arrows doesn't change much and the faster arrows from Akari's bow and [Archery] skill didn't stop Nira from doing the same thing she did to the earlier archer, cutting down any arrow that comes near.

After trying with 60 arrows in the span of roughly 20 seconds, Akari just surrendered.

The next round also involved a tie between Heathcliff and Kirito. They had reached a stalemate.

Kirito's onslaught was less ferocious than Nira's, since he was bound by the conventional rules of sword skills. Heathcliff already knew what to expect to an extent from his fight with Nira and was able to defend better. This meant Heathcliff's HP hardly dropped at all. Kirito also didn't have the speed of Nira, the speed required to dance around and land at least small blows. Heathcliff's defense was an even worse match for him than Nira.

Unfortunately for Heathcliff, Kirito was physically stronger and had better defense than Nira, meaning that he was unable to get any hits in through his attacks.

The duel ran out of time and they were both a basically full HP.

In the next round Nira fought Kirito. It would have gone similarly to their sword skill duel before, however Nira had a notable advantage in that regard and Kirito lost.

"I win! I'm officially the strongest player in the game!" Nira says with a smile.

"Technically neither Heathcliff nor I are yet eliminated."

"Whatever. I can beat either of you again," Nira says.

"You caught him by surprise last time? How do you plan to beat him? For that matter, I have things to do about whatever it is you're doing too."

"I could have just stalled for time. His HP was low enough that if I just dodged and avoided, I would win, I just wouldn't have been particularly satisfied. Also I still have another trump card, far stronger than what I showed," Nira says.

* * *

 **I'm sorry the only fight I really wrote was the Nira vs Heathcliff fight. I decided that Kirito vs Heathcliff being a tie was reasonable since while in canon Heathcliff was weaker than Kirito (their duel would have ended in Kirito's victory if not for system over assist), this Heathcliff is stronger.**

 **Hope this chapter at least somewhat makes up for the last one.**

 **Anybody is welcome to guess what Nira's [Unique Skill] is. I'll give you a hint, since you don't really have enough information.**

 **First, it involves speed, and second, it would be outside of the NerveGear's technical capabilities to implement in the canon, however it is within the capability of a different device within Reki Kawahara's writing.**

 **Okay, here's another, the existence of the ability to warp reality with willpower is from the same device.**

 **That's all you get. In retrospect, it is pretty obvious, but most people probably haven't read/watched Accel World or the SAO Light Novels, so who knows. And at this rate I've practically said it already, so I'll just say it; the device does not exist in the SAO anime.**

 **Thanks for reading and please review. Do take a guess at Nira's [Unique Skill] though. I'm curious how many people can figure it out.**


	10. Chapter 10

**I'm afraid I won't be revealing Nira's [Unique Skill] yet...**

 **Anyone who does manage to guess what it is gets a virtual cookie. Or at least, what I hinted at it being, I changed my mind about what it is, so the hints don't all help you.**

 **I won't be revealing the nature of what they're doing with the sword skills till next chapter either. Here, I'll tell you this though, it exists in Underworld and exists in Accel World. All abilities shown are actually canon, just in Underworld instead of in Sword Art Online. If you've read the LNs and still can't figure it out... well, it's probably just not as obvious when you don't know that the answer.**

 **You know what sucks? I've been chewing gum basically all the time so as to not bite my nails and now it tastes like vaguely minty chemistry. Not that I've ever tried actual chemicals of the sort you don't eat, but you get the idea.**

* * *

After Kirito and Heathcliff had 2 more rematches which both ended in draws, they each had a rematch with Nira, both of which she won using her [Unique Skill]. Not _easily_ , but won.

"So you were holding back in all but the last two matches?" Kirito asks.

"Using a [Unique Skill] I feel like I did nothing to earn to win feels like cheating."

"Heathcliff used his," Kirito points out.

"Regardless, how did you warp sword skills?" Heathcliff asks.

"Power of will," Nira says with a smug smile. Akari chuckles.

Kirito looks at her skeptically. "You're joking, right?"

"Not at all. Seriously all it takes is trying to do it hard enough. The only thing necessary is trying to do it, really," Nira says.

"I find that hard to believe. The NerveGear should simply be incapable of having a feature like that," Kirito says.

"I highly doubt the NerveGear works the way Kayaba says it does. Tell me, how would _sleep_ poison, or alcohol for that matter, work if the NerveGear actually did work the way Kayaba claims? It wouldn't, that's how. There's no possible way you could make someone drunk by intercepting nerve signals," Nira says.

"You have a point. Still what do you actually _do_ to accomplish that?"

"Hard to explain. The way Akari and I found out about it was by simply seeing if it was possible to make sword skills change by attempting to apply force," Nira says.

"Whatever you say," Kirito says sarcastically.

"Just try it. Push as hard as you can to go faster. It should be easier for you than it was for us at first because you know it's possible and this doesn't apply just to yourself. In other words, since we believe you can do it, it should help you," Nira says.

"Right... so basically, whatever people believe will happen will?" Kirito asks.

"Well, not whatever, or maybe bigger things are believed impossible at the backs of everyone else's minds with sufficient force that just 1 or 2 people willing it isn't enough. Makes you wonder, if we got together the entire player base and all believed together—that makes me cringe so much—then maybe we could just kill boss's with our minds," Nira says.

"That's probably wishful thinking," Asuna says.

"Even if it isn't, there'd be no way to actually make it work," Akari points out.

"I know it's wishful thinking, just thinking about it," Nira says.

"'Believe in yourself and you can do it', huh?" Kirito says and puts his sword to the side in the starting position for [Horizontal].

He activates the skill and the sword moves a speed impossible without sword skills, and even with under normal conditions.

"Congratulations, you just broke the game," Akari says.

"You try now, Heathcliff," Nira says.

Heathcliff also succeeds, relatively easy after seeing Kirito do it.

As Asuna talks to Kirito and Heathcliff watches them, Nira walks over to where nobody was looking at and points her hand at a pebble on the ground. And imagines as hard and precisely as she can the pebble lifting off the ground and into her hand.

The pebble moves slightly and then stops.

"Telekinesis is possible, cool," Nira says.

"Huh?" says Akari, the only person close enough to hear.

"I made that pebble move a bit with my mind. Just a bit, but it proves it's possible," Nira says.

"Maybe, or maybe anymore and the programming would not let it work, overriding the whatever allows this to work," Akari says.

"Maybe, but with that kind of negative thinking it'll never work," Nira says.

"I find it annoying how true that is," Akari says with a sigh.

A few minutes later, Kirito approaches them.

"What's up?" Akari asks.

"Asuna and I were planning to go do a dungeon tomorrow, I was wondering if you two would like to join us. Like old times," Kirito says.

The two look at each other.

"Sure, we'll join you. Is Heathcliff coming?" Nira says.

"He says he needs make sure he can take the time from his guild but he'd like to join us," Kirito says.

"Cool, having a tank is useful," Nira says.

"Indeed, as effective as Akari's support is, the 4 of us make a pretty unbalanced party. 2 pure DPS, 1 DPS/Harasser, and 1 support DPS," Kirito says.

"Yeah. Since there are no healers, at least not to a degree any one of us 4 can't do, with Heathcliff we'll be good. While having a second tank would normally be good, Heathcliff is considerably more effective than 2 normal tanks," Nira says.

"Maybe we can fight a boss with some strategy that isn't try to kill it before it can put out enough damage to kill us."

"'The best offense makes a good defense'," Nira says.

"Who said that? That seems like a pretty changed version"

"Heathcliff during our duel," Nira says.

"I suppose he's right. The best defense makes a good offense, too. Which has the opposite meaning of the normal meaning of that expression despite being very similar since normally it means that having a good offense is the best defense," Kirito agrees.

"So any particular dungeon in mind?"

"Yes, actually, but it's pretty far from any teleporters so we'll just show you tomorrow. Argo found it and we bought the location from her. Asuna and I peaked inside but decided that just two of us would be very risky," Kirito says.

"Theme?"

"Some sort of war between light and dark-"

"We're siding with dark, right?" Nira says.

"-who aren't actually good and evil or something and those are just themes, like forest and dark elves. When the dungeon quest turned out to be to stop it, we decided that it was a good place to turn back and get some help. The NPC claims the entire war was caused by a misunderstanding and if we can help her stop it, she and both sides will be grateful. We didn't accept the quest yet," Kirito said.

"Aww," Nira pouts.

Akari chuckles. "That sounds pretty cool."

"I wonder if there are vampires in ACO," Nira mutters.

"Huh?"

"Nira is often a vampire in games where the player can be one."

"Vampires are awesome!" she says.

"True," Akari admits.

"And they generally get life steal, which is generally OP as all hell when mixed with a DPS build, as long as you can survive a single hit," Nira says.

"That depends on what game you play, but I understand what you mean," Kirito says.

"Well, if that's tomorrow, I'm gonna go sleep," Nira says with a smile.

"It's not late though..." Kirito says. It was, indeed, not all that late. Only 7 PM.

"I don't know about you, but I'm tired as hell after that tournament," Nira says.

"I suppose you do have a point. I fought even more matches than you did and I do feel rather tired actually. Maybe I'll go take a nap too," Kirito says.

"Naps? You go to invite to a dungeon raid and I come over and you're talking about _naps_?" Asuna asks.

"If you don't recall, we just had a tournament. Good night," Nira says.

She grabs a teleport crystal out of her coat.

"Bye," Akari says and grabs Nira's hand.

"Teleport Tufmuz," Nira says. Tufmuz was the main settlement on the 9th floor.

"Hmm, they're still staying there?" Asuna wonders. Asuna was referring to the [Living Caverns] they had unlocked as a place of residence, among other things, back on the 9th floor when they completed a dungeon together. Asuna and Kirito had come by to talk to Actaea a couple of times, but they didn't realize Nira and Akari were still staying there. Since the two weren't particularly social, they had never invited Kirito and Asuna to their place so the latter two never realized that they still hadn't moved.

"As nice as that place and Actaea are, we should really get them to move in to our place. We have tons of room and it's considerably more comfortable," Kirito says.

"That's true. Besides, as annoying as Nira can be sometimes, I like having them around," Asuna says.

"We'll have to invite them to our guild once we get around to making it," Kirito says.

"That's a given. Maybe Heathcliff will stop inviting us to his guild once we make our own," Asuna says.

"That would be nice. Anyway, I'm gonna take Nira's example and go sleep," Kirito says.

"I suppose I'll join you, that was actually pretty tiring. And infuriating, my matches with Akari and Nira especially," Asuna says.

* * *

The next day, the 5—Heathcliff had managed to finish or offload onto his second-in-command all the things he had to do that day as guild leader—meet on the 65th floor, the last unlocked floor, and head out.

"4 days on this floor and Argo already managed to find something obscure? Wow," Nira says after a while of walking.

"Speaking of Argo, I still need to pay her back for what she pulled on Christmas," Nira adds.

"I don't think I want to know what you come up with," Kirito says.

"Hmm... maybe pretend to be PKers and ambush her," Nira plots aloud, knowing that in this area Argo couldn't be following them without her noticing.

"Sounds cruel and wonderful," Akari agrees.

Heathcliff thinks how children's pranks normally don't involve pretending to be trying to kill the victim, then realizes they sometimes _do_ and also that it is probably a bad idea to comment on it unless he wants to be the victim.

Instead he says something else.

"Speaking of PKers, Laughing Coffin is becoming a big problem. They've killed over 300 people by now and they're not going to stop on their own any time soon. If we don't do something, by the time we clear the game, they'll have killed at least 700-800, especially since they've been getting stronger. We'll need to do something about them, and soon."

"Unfortunately, we don't where their base is," Asuna says.

"They're [Red Players], that means unless they wear concealing hoods and cloaks, they can't enter safe zones without being attacked and killed or arrested by powerful guards and even then, if they get close to anyone, their cursor will be revealed. Thus, they can't travel between floors, except by manually climbing the labyrinths or extremely carefully prowling through cities. We can use this. We can watch for and follow players concealing their cursors in the cities, especially teleporters, and the boss rooms they'd have to pass through. And, regardless of what method they use, traveling floors will be difficult and/or risky for them, and unlike for other players, how many floors makes a difference. This means it is likely that their base is near the floors where they are the most active, so we can start there," Nira says.

"The biggest issue is that the moment we start watching the boss rooms, and maybe even just the teleporters, they'll know we're searching for them and slink away into their holes. We can't enlist the entire player base either, since they'd obviously know then. We'd need to have at least 400 trustworthy people, 200 of whom would need high [Hiding] skills," Kirito says.

"Not necessarily. Once we have an idea of the floor they're on, we only need a few people stationed above and below the floor. The big issue is teleporters. For that however, we can just put out a big warning. Not an enlistment, but a warning, so they don't think we're actively hunting them. A warning that says to check anyone who has a concealed cursor. Maybe make them think we're taking a passive approach and offer a reward for any red player caught using teleporters. If you reveal one you get some col. It wouldn't cause an overly big inconvenience for people who aren't red players and just wear hoods anyway, since all it takes to reveal someones cursor is to get within a few meters in front of them. Then you just holler for guards and don't put yourself in needless danger. This should hopefully keep them from traveling using teleporters, to a large extent anyway, so they would be forced to travel through boss rooms," Heathcliff says.

In safe zones, you can attack a red player, however they will be able to fight back then. If you don't touch them then they can't touch you, however, even if you call for guards.

"You're right. Then once we pinpoint the floor they're on, we can keep them locked in on that floor, since they can't use teleport crystals except to teleport to the current floor and you can't use teleporters immediately after using a crystal. Once they're locked onto that floor, we can begin searching the floor for their base and we can have people stop going to that floor outside the safe zone. Even if they find out then, they won't be able to do much," Kirito says.

"The only remaining issue will be the 'green' players. The spies and informants. This won't catch them. They might be unable to harm people directly without becoming red, but they can recruit, or they can just be willing to sacrifice their green status for a sneak attack that lets them escape the floor," Akari says.

"This plan will need some work, but it should be workable. Let's agree to never speak of this to _anyone_ else, even those we trust, simply because while they aren't Laughing Coffin, they may trust someone who _is_. So until we need to and all agree, nobody but us 5 finds out about this," Nira says.

"That seems reasonable. The moment Laughing Coffin finds out that they're being hunted and not just guarded against, it'll be infinitely harder to catch them," Heathcliff says.

"We all agree on that?" Kirito asks.

Akari and Asuna agree.

"Still, as important as this is, this is _supposed_ to be a day off of having fun, so let's change topic. The point of this excursion was to do a dungeon raid and have fun," Asuna says.

"You're right," Akari agrees.

* * *

 **Laughing Coffin gets its first mention. I don't know the exact canon mechanics for red players and safe zones, but I feel like the mechanics I use are reasonable. Anyone is welcome to try to play the role of Poh or whatever and try to figure out what Laughing Coffin can do to escape this issue (assuming their secrecy and whatever goes to plan).**

 **That aside, I'm sorry this chapter is a little short and that it took forever. I felt like writing some other stuff (haven't and probably never will post, but if I do, it's a Fate/Stay Night X SAO crossover) but now that I've satisfied myself with that (for now) I'm planning to get back to write this.**

 **I posted this right now because it seemed like a reasonable place to stop and I plan to go to bed right now, so it's just a matter of whether I post this now or not and I decided it would be better this way.**

 **Just a little spoiler hint thing; Poh in this story was a murder before ACO. Try to figure out what significance this has... The other half that should help you guess is a part of the summary... this might be a little too obvious, or it might be a case of hindsight 20/20 on my part.**

 **If anybody thinks I do too much of this thing where I have you (the readers as a whole, I mean) figure stuff out from hints.**

 **Well, thanks for reading and good night. Please review and tell me what you thought of the chapter!**


	11. Chapter 11

**Okay, I'll say it, the technique they're doing with the sword skills is called [Incarnation]. The use of a person's or group's will and imagination to override reality.**

* * *

"It should be just over here," Kirito says as they walk into a cave.

"About time," Nira mutters.

"Quit whining," Asuna says.

"I'm good, thanks for the offer though," Nira says.

"You..." Asuna growls. "Why the hell did we even bring you along?!" she says in exasperation after a moment.

"Because you needed help," Akari supplies.

"It was a rhetorical question!" Asuna says in annoyance.

"I know that, I'm not stupid," Akari answers.

"Why did you answer then?!" Asuna asks. She really hated the two sometimes.

"Because you reacting like that is amusing," Akari says.

"So you _do_ piss people off on purpose," Asuna says triumphantly.

"Never denied it," Akari says with a smile.

They walk down a few tunnels until it transforms into a grey stone corridor.

They pass through a door and it opens into an enormous hall, 100 meters wide, 60 long, and 30 tall. Spaced 20 meters apart and positioned 20 meters from the long walls at pillars that reach up to the ceiling. There were 4 doors in the room, two gates at the shorter sides and two small doors, one of which they had come through, on the shorter sides.

In the middle two groups were fighting. Knights dressed in gilded white plate, smooth and rounded armor on the left (from the groups perspective) and knights dressed in black armor with red where there was gold on the gilded armor. Their armor had sharp spikes and the like on it. Both parties had faces covered in helmets.

"We need to get past them," Kirito says, "And neither side will be particularly friendly to us."

"Do we have an options but fighting our way through?"

"Yes. On the far side of a of the few pillars there are ladders leading into the ceiling. By going up them, we can pass over the battle and down on the other side," Kirito says and they climb the pillars. The ladders were more like chunks carved out of the pillar that you could put your foot or hand into, but even Heathcliff was easily able to climb it and they descended on the other side.

"How long did it take you to figure that out?" Nira asks Kirito.

"A few minutes. We approached the fight and then turned back and saw the ladders.

"Where's the NPC?" Akari asks.

"He's a little way further," Asuna says.

They pass through the door and head through more halls.

As they round a corner, they run into a group of black knights.

"Maybe we should try to negotiate?" Heathcliff suggests.

"Won't work. They don't appear to be intelligent and if you knock off their armor, you can see they are some sort of pitch black constructs, not people," Kirito says.

Nira practically disappears, stabbing through the throat of one and causing it to shatter before it can react. The remaining 5 units in the group die almost as quickly.

"What part was hard?"

"The quest involves fighting two bosses at once," Kirito says.

"If you say so," Nira responds as they head on.

* * *

A short while of wandering later, they find a portal. It was just a door way, however the outside didn't match up with what should be there (for example, sky was visible) and it was slightly blue tinted.

"Do we go through?" Heathcliff asks Kirito.

"We did," Kirito answers and steps through.

The 4 others follow him through.

They were standing in hilly plains, the door they had just passed through seemingly leading into a tiny cottage. The field seemed to be the entire floor of Aincrad even though it was the same size as the floor they were previously on. An alternate version of the floor likely invisible from the outside, further suggested by the fact that the time of day was different (evening instead of afternoon). They were in roughly the center.

In the the very center was a circular structure. At the base it was a cylinder that went up 50 meters and had a radius of 50 meters. In the two sides not facing at or away from them were large entrances, stairs leading up 2 meters before a gate 4 meters wide and 6 tall. The remaining two sides had smaller doors. The entire structure was decorated with excessive amounts of gold and jewels. The roof was a dome of glass triangles with gilded metal frames. All the stone was the grey stone of the dungeon except the stairs, where the left was white and the right was black.

The two sides faced castles of their respective castles.

They look back through and see that it leads back where they came, so they wouldn't need to use teleport crystals to get back.

"Adventure- I see you have returned with help?" an old woman in grey robes with grey hair—It was all the 50% grey of the dungeon—says as she approaches them.

"Yes. We'll help you now," Asuna says.

"What do we need to do?" Nira asks.

"I'll explain. Long ago, the kingdoms, White and Black continuously fought over the Sacred Orb of the Great God, Grey. They both worshipped him and wanted to have the orb to earn his favor. At one point—both kingdoms claim they had the orb at the time and they both claim it was their idea—the kings decided that the bloodshed was pointless and that they should share the orb and that this would surely make Grey look favorably upon both of them. So they built that temple you see in the middle. In the center of it usually sits the orb in all its glory. However, recently the orb was stolen. Both sides accused the other of stealing it and so a war broke out. However, the orb was not stolen by one of the kingdoms."

"So who stole it?"

"General Black and General White-"

"Wait, have these generals been around since the formation of these kingdoms or something?" Akari asks.

"No, when someone becomes the Grand General, they get the name Black or White in Black kingdom and White kingdom respectively. The same applies to kings, so people distinguish them by saying General X or King X. Anyway, General Black and General White were told by a [Beast of Brown] that during war their support and power increase so they collaborated and together stole the orb in order to start a war. I've tried telling this to the kings, however the generals were always present and would scream how it was an outrageous accusation based on nothing."

"So what do we need to do?" Nira repeats.

"You must assassinate the generals, acquire proof they were collaborating, and retrieve the Orb. Don't feel bad about killing the soldiers, they're all magical constructs made through the power of the [Sacred Orb of Black] and [Sacred Orb of White]. There are some who aren't, but you'll be able to tell."

"How do you know this?"

"I am a Messenger of Grey."

"Okay, what do we do first?"

"In order to prevent one of the kingdoms from taking damages due to losing the war, we must kill both generals at once. This also prevents one from being on guard if the other is assassinated and prevents them from blaming each other and making peace that much more difficult. In order to do this, we must wait for our chance. The two generals meet every now and then to discuss plans, we must strike then. It will be a challenge, as they are powerful opponents, however there is no other way."

"When will this be?"

"It just so happens that they will meet this night. In the mean time, we can kill the [Beast of Brown] to whom they gave the Orb," the Messenger of Grey says.

"Where is it?"

"I don't know exactly, just what cave it is in. We will have to search through it. I'm afraid I can't fight very well however I can help find it."

"Alright... uh, what should we call you?"

"Just call me Mey," the **Me** ssenger of Gre **y** says.

"Alright, Mey, lead us to the cave," Kirito says.

* * *

They enter a cave of brown rock.

"Let's just try one tunnel at a time?" Nira asks as they reach a 8-way split.

"That might not work."

"If this is like a tree-graph then we can just check every end and it's fairly likely that none of the ends would meet up," Nira says.

"I guess we can try. We can leave behind marks to make sure we don't get lost."

"So which tunnel would Kayaba _not_ expect us to choose?" Asuna asks.

Nira flips a coin thrice.

"This one," she says, pointing to the tunnel third from the left.

They head down the tunnel and it turns to an unnatural corridor, perfectly rectangular but still made of the same brown rock.

They pass through a doorway with no door and it opens into a room and there is a large boss door at the other side. The room, however, is full of mud golems. They bear the name [Brown Golem].

"Can we kill them?"

"They're weaker than even the Black or White golems," Mey answers.

That's all they need to hear as everyone but Akari charges forward and Akari shoots an arrow. The arrow just gets stuck in the thing and hardly harms it.

Akari's next arrow glows with a yellow light and explodes when it hits the golem, scattering it and causing it to shatter. However the archery skills had considerable cooldown, so she mostly just smashed them with her bow, finding it just as effective as sword.

Nira, Kirito and Heathcliff tear them apart with strikes from their swords. Asuna has a lot of trouble doing anything. They had no armor to speak of, but no weak points either, rendering a rapier almost completely ineffective. She had to revert to swinging it around, which wasn't particularly effective due to low mass.

Still, the enemies were all dead before long.

They push open the boss door and inside is an odd creature.

Its name is [Liulfr the Beast of Brown].

The upper body, thighs, head, and upper arms were all that of a werewolf with muddy brown fur. Everything below the knees or elbows, however, was made of rock.

"Messenger of Grey... you've come for your god's Orb, haven't you?" the thing says with a smile.

"Hand it over unless you wish to die," Mey threatens.

"Don't make me laugh," the wolf says and charges at Mey.

Heathcliff steps in front of her and braces his shield in the ground, stopping the charge dead.

Kirito steps out from behind him and swings at its chest, however it blocks with its stone paw and swings back at him.

Kirito jumps back behind Heathcliff and the wolf is forced not to attack again when Akari shoots at it and forces it to block.

Nira manages to cut it across the chest as it jumps back from her strike.

Kirito charges forward as it lands and strikes at its heart with [Vorpal Strike].

It blocks with its right hand and strikes back with its left, breaking through Kirito's defense and cutting his right hand. It does not escape unscathed itself, however, as the heavy blow from [Vorpal Strike] takes a chunk out of its stone paw, including knocking off the thumb and index claws. Since it blocked the attack without even moving out of the range of Kirito's sword, it doesn't realize the power of [Vorpal Strike].

Kirito lets winces at the injury, however it doesn't disable him since he had gotten used to pain to an extent and his [Battle Hardened] skill reduced the pain.

He leaps back and Asuna hands him a potion, which he drinks after a quick 'thank you'.

The boss's HP as down to around 80% and it only had one bar.

Heathcliff steps towards it and swings his sword with [Vertical]. It takes the blow with its damaged paw and counterattacks with its other paw, trying to strike around Heathcliff's shield, however the PMD is too short to stop Heathcliff from blocking the attack.

Akari shoots an [Explosive Arrow], however the beast doesn't recognize the attack blocks with its damaged paw and the already cracked and damaged paw shatters, leaving it was a jagged stone stump.

Nira leaps forward with a [Linear] and activates [Vorpal Strike] with her other sword as the creature jumps into the air and can't alter its trajectory just as [Linear] finishes. The beast twists in time to keep the lightning fast strike from piercing its heart and take the blow to its other arm, disabling it completely.

The creature is left with a limp arm and a stump.

All 4 of them charge and Akari shoots, the creature doesn't last long and Akari gets the LAB, which is a pair of claws called [Brown Claws].

"Well done, adventurers."

Mey walks to the far end of room and claims the [Sacred Orb of Grey].

* * *

As they leave the cave, they find that it is night.

"What the hell? We weren't in here for long... and the time still matches up with it being earlier. In fact, it never even switched to the time of this world, which suggests that it is just saying what time it is in normal Aincrad. I guess there was a quest event triggered time jump in this place," Nira says.

Mey doesn't seem to notice.

"The Generals will be meeting soon. We must hurry. They are meeting under the guise of potential peace negotiations, so they will have guards," Mey says.

* * *

The meeting was being held between the hut where they had come through and the temple.

They were in an enormous tent and on the outside on either side were knights of both colors. Some of them weren't wearing masks over their faces, the humans.

"If Akari kills one of the golems on one of the sides, they should assume they were attacked by the other side and start a fight that'll save us having to fight them," Heathcliff suggests.

"And if it fails, all we're doing is making our ambush a tiny bit worse," Kirito agrees.

Akari shoots a golem on each side of the large tent.

"Why each side?" Asuna asks.

"Well, if they're perfectly balanced, it seems they're destined to balance perfectly, so that means they'll exterminate each other," Akari says.

A fight breaks out and rather quickly, all the golems die and all the soldiers either die or are injured enough to warrant retreat.

The tent is left unguarded and the generals don't react, the tent was probably soundproof.

"There are two. You 4 focus on killing one and I'll tank the other until you can come finish it off. If I am being overwhelmed we will retreat together," Heathcliff says.

"Alright."

The group of 5—Mey stays back to not get in the way—cut through the wall of the tent.

"Who are you?" questions general White.

"Why are you interrupting out meeting?" asks general Black.

"We've come to put an end to your treacherous schemes... or something like that... We've come to kill you," Nira says.

Heathcliff charges forward at General White. The other tries to join in, however Akari shoots him and he turns to them, blocking the arrow with his armored forearm.

He draws a sword and shield.

They draw him out of the tent and surround him. Akari keeps her distance while Kirito, Nira, and Asuna form an equilateral triangle around him with Kirito in front of him, since of the 3, Kirito has the strongest defense.

General Black finds himself constantly trying and failing to move out of the encirclement, or rather, entrianglement, and getting attacked from all sides.

His armor doesn't keep him alive for long before the 4 move to assist Heathcliff.

10 minutes after the fight starts—the generals had a lot of HP—, both generals are dead.

They return to Mey, who goes into the tent and collects all the plans they had drawn up.

When they leave the tent, it is morning and they head to the temple.

Mey speaks to the guards inside—both Black and White, it was a neutral zone—and tells them that they have the Orb and they will only return it if _both_ kings come.

Messangers leave and the sun shifts quickly to noon, both gates opening and both kings coming in at exactly the same time.

"So you stole the Orb? You, the one who accused General Black of collaborating with General White and stealing it?" King Black asks.

"No, these adventurers retrieved the Orb from the [Beast of Brown] who convinced your generals to steal it. Their peace meeting was really a planning session for how to precede further, and here is proof of that," Mey says and shows the papers.

"And where are the generals now?"

"Dead," Mey says.

"Betrayed by our own generals and fooled into a pointless war instead of collaborating to retrieve the Orb. Thank you adventurers for your service, and we humbly apologize for doubting your words and nature as a Messenger of Grey," the kings say together.

* * *

They go back to the normal Aincrad with their rewards. They got a large amount of col and XP, as well as items for each of them.

For Akari, she got a [Bow of Grey]. It was a powerful bow, more powerful than Akari's current one. And it had special effects. If drawn without an arrow, an arrow of light will be made from the shooters HP. The arrow heals and restores the HP of anyone whom it hits. When shot like this, the bow turns white with blue designs. If drawn with an arrow, the arrow gains life steal and a dark aura. The dark aura will directly drain the HP of the person it hits up to a limit. It doesn't matter where it hits for this effect. If it is pulled out before reaching the limit then damage done is reduced. The bow turns black with red accents while it is drawn like this.

Kirito and Asuna got [Swords of Grey], made in the exact shape and weight of their current swords. It could be activated in two modes, 'light mode' and 'dark mode. In 'dark mode', the sword gives a significant amount of life steal and increased power, which comes in the form of base damage for any attack and increased cutting power. The sword is black with red and is also surrounded by a black aura with red electric sparks. In 'light mode' the sword is much easier to block with and successful blocks will heal the user. It gains a white aura and blue sparks. The sword can be deactivated, in which case it stays in the mode it was in but the aura and effect is gone. The moment you start fighting it automatically activates.

Heathcliff got a [Shield of White]. It has 2 modes, 'light mode' and 'white mode'. 'Light mode' functions exactly like 'light mode' for the [Sword of Grey]. 'White mode' sacrifices offense for even stronger defense. Damage dealt is reduced by a fixed amount per strike, though it is unable to go below 0. In exchange, you recover a significant amount of HP passively and even heal injuries. It also has a similar effect on strikes _against_ you as it does on your own strikes, reducing damage you take from each strike. It also has all effects of 'light mode'. The shield can deactivated much like the [Sword of Grey].

Nira got two [Swords of Black], which perfectly reflect your fighting style of 'kill it really fast before it can kill you'. It can be in 'dark mode', 'black mode', and 'blacker mode'. 'Dark mode' is identical to the dark mode on the [Sword of Grey]. 'Black mode' has the same features powered up and gives you a bit of damage as a percent of enemy's current bar at the price of having your HP continuously drained and having a fixed amount of damage being added to any hit that lands, damage that leaks through blocking is not amplified though. Finally, 'Blacker mode'. In this mode, you still gain life steal and it does enormous amounts of damage and cuts through things much easier. This comes at a price. First, It consumes your HP at a rate which would kill you in roughly 30 seconds. Second, it makes your armor entirely useless. As in, things literally pass through your armor.

All in all, a very profitable venture.

* * *

 **Sorry this took so long... wait... I feel like I'm saying this like every chapter...**

 **I made it a very comical quest with perfectly matched enemies and kingdoms and gods named after colors, so please review and tell me what you thought. Also tell me if the gear they got is too overpowered (who am I kidding, it is overpowered).**

 **Follow and favorite please!**

 **Bye bye!**


	12. Chapter 12

**We're nearing the beginning of the end of the Aincrad arc... That was completely pointless to say.**

 **I really haven't gotten a chance to write much recently due to the real world, sorry. Also because another story was stuck in my head and I needed to write it to get it out (and it will now forever sit forgotten).**

 **There is another story I think I want to write, however, I expect it to be the type of story I might actually be able to finish, so I probably want to reach some sort of conclusion with this one.**

 **I also made Nira's [Swords of Black] weaker. I got rid of the Demonic Sword Gram ability. I mean really, why would a sword acquired in a side quest in the middle of the game be that overpowered?**

 **Can someone tell me who the girl in the middle of the picture in the background in the SAO wiki is (Imgur** zJowHdJ **(appreciate my effort, I spent 30 seconds looking for the link to the image in the source code of the website** **)? The one who isn't Kirito or Asuna, I mean. I'm going to take a guess and say she's from Ordinal Scale for three reasons, A, she's not from the anime or the LNs (that I can remember), B, the earpieces Kirito and Asuna are wearing, and C, the image background is a modified cityscape.**

* * *

"I've made a guild called the Black Swords. So far, Silica, Liz, Agil, and even Argo have agreed to join and the Black Cats and Fuurinkazan are merging in. Obviously, Asuna is also in it," Kirito says.

"Where is she?" Akari asks.

"She's off talking to the other guild leaders and informing them of our existence. Either way, as you've probably guessed, I'm inviting you."

"Same rules as for Heathcliff," Nira answers.

"Figured. So if I can beat you, you'll join?"

"Two of three at least, and I don't want to do it right now, I'm too lazy," Nira says.

"Okay."

"If you then lose to Heathcliff, we'll switch to his guild, or if I beat you, we leave," Nira adds.

* * *

"You called this meeting, what's this all about?" Lind asks Heathcliff.

Several days after they talked on the way to a dungeon and a day after Kirito made his guild, they arranged (Heathcliff actually called it) a meeting to arrange for people to watch for potential red players using teleporters. They planned to do this via bounties. Since revealing someone's cursor wasn't difficult and didn't require getting particularly close to them, people would just need to approach anyone with a hidden cursor from the front and if they were a red player call for guards. The NPC guards in cities were ridiculously powerful and scaled with the latest cleared floor, not the floor they were on.

"Laughing Coffin," Heathcliff answers, "They've already killed hundreds and are becoming an increasingly large problem that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. That said, if they know we're after dealing with them will be far more difficult, so the rest of this conversation does not leave this room."

"So? Just saying 'they're a problem' is pointless unless you have an idea of what to do about it," Diabel says.

"We simply cut off or at least limit their ability to travel between floors, figure out which floor they're on, and tell people not to leave safe zones on that floor if possible until we find their base and deal with them," Heathcliff says.

"And how we do that?"

"Tell people to check anyone whose cursor is concealed. It doesn't take getting particularly close and the NPC guards will arrest them if somebody just shouts that they're a criminal and they have an orange cursor. We can offer a sizable reward for any orange players revealed to encourage people," Heathcliff says.

"Who pays the rewards?" Lind asks.

"It doesn't matter. We can split it between our guilds, for example. It won't be a particularly large total sum for all the orange players in the game, so if necessary, the KBO could pay it. Either way, this will prevent or at least greatly discourage red players, such as Laughing Coffin, from using teleporters," Heathcliff says.

"And what will stop them from walking between floors? Do we have to keep people posted in all the boss rooms at all times?" Diabel asks.

"If they can't use teleporter their ability to travel will be greatly limited. Traveling many floors would take a very long time so their operations will be limited to around the floor they operate from. We can use this to narrow down where they are. We only require two boss rooms to be watched. That said, we won't do that yet. If Laughing Coffin knows that we're actively hunting them, and how we're hunting them, finding them will be near impossible. They can go into stasis or move their base, for example," Heathcliff says.

"So all we're doing for now is putting up a reward for revealing red players in safe zones?" Diabel asks.

"Yes," Heathcliff says.

"If it is so critical that nobody finds out, why are _they_ here? At least the Black Swordsman is a guild leader now," Lind says.

"Because they are some of the strongest players and they had a significant role in coming up with this plan so they already knew it. To begin with, the entire idea of keeping this plan a complete secret was Nira's. The Lightning Flash also already knows of the plan and that it should not be spoken of to anyone," Heathcliff says.

Lind glares at Nira and Akari, who smile back.

"I don't suppose _they're_ going to help pay the rewards," Lind says.

"They're two people, we have large guilds. Strong players or not, they don't have anywhere near as much Col as even your guild," Heathcliff says, quietly pointing out how Lind's guild was the weakest of the main clearer guilds—Black Swords probably included, however, they can't be properly compared since one is a large guild which accepts anyone above a fairly low power threshold and the other is an elite guild whose members are all friends—ever since the ALF dropped off after the 25th boss fight.

"They should still pay proportionally to the amount of money they have," Lind says.

"Like you're personally going to lose money. You'll still have the Col you take from your guild. And unlike you, we actually personally help clear the game, there's a reason why I'm the strongest and Akari is the strongest archer-" Nira says and is interrupted.

"Yes, because you take what should belong to other players," Lind says.

Nira quietly walks over to the nearest wall and repeatedly bangs her head on it until Akari puts her hand there.

Heathcliff and Kirito chuckle and laugh, respectively.

"You're seriously still on about this? I thought that was Kibaou's thing," Nira says.

"It's true."

"Yes, because when we kill the monsters few others are strong enough to fight which respawn in a few hours we're stealing from other players," she says sarcastically.

"The reason we're strongest is because we continuously put ourselves at risk by fighting, not because we steal from other players. That's what _you_ do when your guild bullies people out of rare drops," Nira says.

Lind starts to say something but Nira asks Akari, "How hard do you think I could punch him without my cursor turning orange?"

"Who knows."

Lind once more starts to say something but Kirito says, "How about you start making a fool of yourself by picking on a 14-year-old? You're going to get your ass kicked eventually. And by eventually, I mean whenever you actually succeed in pissing Nira off."

Lind huffs and asks, "So we're done here?"

"Yes. For now," Heathcliff answers.

Lind leaves rather too quickly, followed shortly by Diabel.

"Kirito and Nira, since you two somehow managed to find the time to train your [Hiding] skills and wear equipment that boosts them further as well as naturally helps you hide, once we narrow down where Laughing Coffin's base is located, you'll be in charge."

"I have a potential alternate way to locate Laughing Coffin's base... Akari's not going to like it, though. At all," Nira says.

"What?" Heathcliff asks while Akari looks at her suspiciously.

"Two steps. Die and join Laughing Coffin," Nira says, phrasing her plan in arguably the worst possible way.

"By that, I assume you mean somehow fake death and then attempt to infiltrate Laughing Coffin?" Heathcliff asks.

"Yes," Nira says.

"You guessed right about me not liking that plan," Akari says.

"Akari not liking it aside, there are notable issues. Everybody knows your name, so if one of them with a high enough level inspects you and sees your name, you're basically screwed. And Laughing Coffin will already be suspicious of a green player trying to join them. If we say you died, someone will immediately check the [Monument of the Dead] to see if your name is on it," Heathcliff says.

 **[I've replaced the Monument of Life with the Monument of the Dead which instead of showing every name with the dead crossed out just shows the names of the dead]**

"I've got solutions for all those problems. Akari and I got a rare item on a quest recently, which, when used, puts your name on the [Monument of the Dead] until you go there and remove it, along with a means of death of your choice, so that solves that problem. We'd just need a plausible way for me to have died, like Akari and I fighting a boss or something stupid along those lines, because that is definitely something I can see us doing. We've also gotten items which allow you to change the Color and length of your hair, change your eye Color, as well as change displayed level and name and also effectively put on makeup that doesn't wash off or anything and is removed using the item. It's single use and once you disable it, it breaks, but one use would be enough. Lastly, there is an item which makes your cursor orange while you use it," Nira says.

"That's awfully convenient," Asuna says.

"Not really, those are just among the sea of other items we've gotten. The item for making your cursor orange is acquired from a quest that can be done by multiple people, for that matter, and the boss that dropped the disguise item respawns, but he scales with last cleared floor. The only semi-unique item is the fake death item," Nira answers.

"You're not doing that," Akari says, "It's far too risky. Even if you do manage to get them to trust you, you'd be surrounded by murderers and literally walking into Laughing Coffin's base without even being able to have your good weapons, or even _one_ of your good weapons, equipped."

"One thing goes wrong and you're surrounded by the entire Laughing Coffin, they all want to kill you, and you don't even have your good armor or weapons equipped," Akari adds.

"You know, the moment I get them to take me to their base, my job would basically be over. I wouldn't need to actually go in,"

"And what do you do if they need you do kill someone as initiation or something?" Akari asks.

"Then I stop them and abort," Nira answers.

"And if you encounter PoH, XaXa, or Johnny Black?"

"What about it? If they attack me, I can beat them. If they don't, then ideally I can catch one of them, ideally PoH, before I leave with the base's location and drag them to the Black Iron Palace," Nira says.

"And if I say I'm not letting you do that?"

Nira groans. "Then I'll try to convince you."

"Perhaps it would be better for somebody else to do this? I doubt they'll particularly want a kid. Or believe that you're actually serious. Plus, while you're doing this, you're not on the front lines and you're the strongest player," Kirito suggests.

"Who are you suggesting?" Nira asks, already guessing that he likely meant himself.

"Me, for example," Kirito says.

"Not happening," Asuna says immediately.

Kirito and Nira look at each other and at their respective partners, sigh at the same time, and say, "Girls."

Asuna and Akari look at each other and at their respective partners, sigh at the same time, and say, "Boys."

Heathcliff chuckles.

"What exactly are you implying?" Nira asks Akari.

"Nothing. The way you said 'girls' implies you're not one, which makes you a boy, right?" Akari teases.

"Careful there, you're going to offend some snowflakes by assuming that everyone who isn't a girl is a boy," Nira says semi-sarcastically.

"Regardless, that plan is too dangerous. I am not letting you do that," Akari says.

"Fine. I won't," Nira says unhappily.

* * *

The Clearer guilds then put up posters around every main city telling people to check the cursors of everyone hiding their's who comes through the teleport gates. Of course, a reward was offered because otherwise, people wouldn't do shit. Mostly.

Nothing much happened immediately, but fairly soon a few orange players, including a member of Laughing Coffin were caught, and various orange player activity slowed down.

The Clearers returned to doing what their name entailed. That is, clearing the game.

* * *

Several weeks later, somebody from Laughing Coffin snitched. In other words, revealed the location of their base.

"Almost certainly a trap," Kirito says, "They'll be waiting for us."

"We can take them. We have the advantage in levels, numbers, and gear," Lind says arrogantly.

"They're ALSO willing to kill us while we're not willing to kill them. That alone gives them an enormous advantage, along with home turf advantage," Nira says.

"So what to you propose? Just leave them be?" he asks.

"No, but we need to bring lots of cure crystals and potions, along with paralysis poison so we can disable them without killing. Corridor crystals too, so we can teleport them back to prison. While the normal combat supplies will be needed, just going in like a boss fight and hoping for the best like you seem to have planned will just get us all killed," Nira says.

"Most of Laughing Coffin are agility players, including a fair amount of archers. We need to come prepared for that, not just bring strong players. Shield users and agility players of our own. Nobody with a two-handed weapon, for example, is well suited to this fight. Heavy armor or ability to dodge will be valuable," Akari says.

* * *

After strategy was discussed, people spread out to gather the needed items.

"Nira. _Someone_ is going to die. You realize that, right? There's no way that we will defeat them without killing them or losing any of our own," Akari says.

"I know," Nira says, not particularly wanting to think about the fact that a 'kill or be killed' was quite likely.

"Don't let it be you. Even if you have to kill them," Akari says. "Please, whatever you have to do, don't let it be you."

"Don't die either," Nira says after a short pause.

"I don't plan to," Akari says.

* * *

The Clearer force walked through the tunnels of a dungeon to the place that Laughing Coffin had made into their base. Dark, spooky, and with plenty of places for ambushes.

The group walks into a large open room with one large floor and tons of floating platforms. The reported location of their base.

Heathcliff gives a speech about how it should be remembered that Laughing Coffin won't hesitate to kill and so they can't either.

And then Laughing Coffin jumps them.

The fight quickly turned to chaos. Nira battled a cloaked opponent, cutting his hands off with a paralysis poison-coated sword and throws him to the ground, looking around for anybody who needs help, spinning around and knocking a strike wide, running her sword along the attacker's side, depleting his HP considerably, weakening him to the paralysis poison.

On one of the floating platforms, in the shadows, she sees a somewhat familiar hooded figure. Poh. _If I get him, maybe they'll surrender? Either way, he's important._

Nira jumps across the platforms towards him, attempting to end the fight before it can begin. Unfortunately, it seemed Poh was no slouch in combat since he managed to defend Nira's first strikes and counter attack.

Their fight takes them across several platforms as Nira, not wanting to kill him, is forced not to take his openings.

Slowly, Poh starts to lose. He may have a few advantages for him, but his inferior skill, level, and gear were too much to overcome.

Back towards the main platform, a player shatters and Nira turns to see 2 more follow shortly after as a crazed Laughing Coffin member refuses to surrender and surprises them.

She barely manages to avoid decapitation from [Mate Chopper] due to her distraction, the blade cutting across her chest. She bites down a slight cry and scowls.

"Watch where you swing that, you could take someone's head off," Nira says, focusing on anything but the three people who just got killed.

Poh chuckles. "I would suggest paying attention to your opponent."

Nira moves untrackably fast, cutting across Poh's chest. Though he hardly even flinches from the pain, it takes off roughly 30% of his HP.

 _Why isn't he being paralyzed? Gear? A skill? A potion? Well regardless, looks like my only non-lethal option is taking his hands off._

"Surrender before you make me kill you," Nira says.

"You won't kill me. You can't," Poh says.

"You gonna bet your life on that? You don't know me," Nira taunts.

"I know more about you than you think. I know you're an orphan and that your parents were murdered in front of you with a knife, for example."

"How...?" Nira asks in surprise as she leaps back.

Akari watches Nira's fight with Poh from her perch on one of the floating platforms as she continues to lose poisoned arrows and avoid return fire.

She sees Poh say something and Nira's face go from surprise, to utter shock, to fear, during which Poh attacks, and anger.

Nira moves at speed that really shouldn't be possible, severing Poh's right arm at the elbow 'before' driving her boot into his chest, throwing him to the main platform and jumping down after Laughing Coffin's laughing leader, kicking him into the ground before he naturally lands and landing on top of him.

She repeatedly stomps his head, slamming it into the ground until he shatters still laughing. Looking at Nira's expression, Akari felt slightly afraid and realized that if bodies didn't disappear on death, she would have beaten Poh to a bloody pulp and ground him into the floor.

 _What... what did he say?_

Nira looks down in horror at the scattering blue polygons, exactly the same as they would have been for any other player.

 _I killed him. Even though he was defenseless at that point. Even though it wasn't needed. And I wanted to,_ she thinks. She shakes her head. _No time. People are dying and that needs to be stopped. I'll have plenty of time for hating myself afterward._

As a cloaked player attacks Kirito. Nira strikes him down from behind with a poisoned dagger before Kirito can be forced to take his life.

"Nira," Kirito says.

"How many Clearers have died?" Nira asks as Asuna backs into them, disarming her opponent and paralyzing him.

"At least 5 or 6, I don't know exactly," Kirito says.

Nira grits her teeth. The three stand facing outwards in a circle, separated from the rest of the Clearers as Laughing Coffin surrounds them.

As the Laughing Coffin members advance with surprising coordination, Kirito, Nira, and Asuna prepare for a long fight.

* * *

5-10 minutes later, though it felt like hours, almost all of Laughing Coffin had been captured or killed and the rest had fled. 9 of the Clearers and 21 Laughing Coffin had died, Poh among them.

Akari takes Nira and teleports them home.

The moment they enter the private area, Nira collapses and starts crying into Akari who simply holds her and hugs her until she calms down.

"I..."

"He deserved it," Akari says. She didn't know what Poh had said to anger her so much, but she did know that Poh _did_ deserve what he got.

"Why, though...?"

"What did he say, you mean?" Nira asks.

Akari nods.

"He knew my name. He knew how my parents had died. And he said that he'd killed them," Nira says, shaking slightly as she clung to Akari.

Akari scowls, wishing she had gotten a chance to hurt the bastard.

* * *

 **PLOT TWIST! Except not really.**

 **I'm sorry this took this long, I really couldn't figure out where to go with this.**

 **I'll try not to take so long with chapters in the future.**

 **Anyway, please tell me what you thought as well as follow and favorite! Also please tell me who the girl is if you know.**

 **Bye bye, I'm gonna go sleep.**


	13. Chapter 13

**I'm sorry for ending this arc this abruptly, but I have several fairly good reasons.**

 **The first and main reason is that I simply don't feel like writing this anymore. I had to basically force myself to write the previous chapter (and it was terrible, with holes in it, like how Poh managed to not immediately lose to Nira, even with his advantages, or why Poh would tell her what he did (there is actually a reason, and it's even something which could be canon, but I didn't put it in the chapter)) and the ones before it didn't take as long they did because I don't have time to write (I have tons of free time), but rather because I would sit down to write (or rather switch tabs) and then write a sentence and delete it and then stare at the screen for a few minutes and switch to something else because I had no clue what to write.**

 **The second and more minor reason is that there are other things I want to write (which may or may not work out) which I would rather not do at the same time as this, as well as possibly returning to some of my abandoned stories or writing an epilogue and/or sequel to Duo** **of** **Darkness.**

 **Also sorry for all the math/physics, been doing a bunch of it recently and I can't help it.**

* * *

2 years 2 months, give or take a few days. 793 days. That's how long they had been trapped in ACO. How long it had taken them to get to the door of the 100th boss.

 _Well, our time in ACO is over. No teleporting out and no leaving through the door. Either we kill the final boss and log out or we die,_ Nira thinks.

They approach the massive door to the finally boss room, the throne room of the massive [Ruby Palace] which is the top 5 floors of Aincrad. It was flanked by two massive ruby statues with square shields.

As they are about to reach the door, the two statues come alive and step in front of it, blocking it with their shields.

Everybody backs off.

"Maybe that's the boss?" Asuna wonders.

"Outside the boss room? Also, the final boss is almost certainly a king of some sort. Quite likely Kayaba himself," Nira says.

"True... so why are they blocking our way then?" Asuna asks.

"Well, they're not enemies, since they don't have names or HP bars, they're just 'terrain'. That means fighting them is impossible," Kirito points out.

" **Only five may enter,** " both say in synchrony.

Heathcliff, Nira, Kirito, Akari, and Asuna all look at each other. Everybody already knew they were the ones going. Saying it was pointless.

"The five of us killed a floor boss before," Asuna says.

"It wasn't a milestone boss... it wasn't the final boss," Akari points out.

"It also wasn't designed for being fought by 5 people, unlike this one. If we start feeling defeated before the fight even starts, we won't stand a chance," Heathcliff says.

The 5 walk forward towards the statues which move aside.

"Before we go in, let's give each other our real names and addresses, so if some of us die but we win, the others can tell their family how they died. Besides, if we do win with no casualties, we'll still want to find each other in the real world," Nira says.

A quick exchange of information later and Heathcliff walks forward and pushes the doors open.

"Let's go."

The 5 walk into the enormous room. it was circular, with the side where they came from flattened off a little. It was the entire floor.

It had a diameter of roughly 100 meters and the walls started vertical before they curved to a point. The walls were all made of white marble with the top portion made of ruby, the setting sun casting its rays on the clouds above the crimson skylight.

There were 6 massive white pillars positioned in a regular hexagon of side length 10 meters with one of the sides parallel to the door.

"Hey, at least it's not covered in gold," Nira says.

In the center of the thing, nearly a 50 meters from them, was a large marble and ruby throne, the figure upon the throne was obscured by floating menu screens which shortly vanished as the figure stood, revealing that he was the faceless GM from the start in human size. They suddenly found themselves standing less than 20 meters away from him.

"Welcome. I've been expecting you. As you have likely already guessed, I am Kayaba Akihiko," he says and the cloak dissolves into red mist, this time revealing Kayaba Akihiko—somebody all but Asuna immediately recognized—dressed in a white plate armor with accents that looked like they were actually made of ruby. On his head was a simplistic crown, a white cylinder without either base which had an oval ruby imprinted in the front.

5 HP bars appeared next to him, with the name [The Ruby King].

From either side, he grabs a white handle with a ruby on either end. From one of them, a longsword blade extends, the blade of the same white metal as his armor with the outer 2 centimeters to the sides and 5 centimeters made of ruby.

The other extends into a white kite shield with a ruby edge and a large ruby set in the center.

"I originally planned to join the players, lead you to the 95th floor before I would leave and wait here, however it's better this way," Kayaba says.

"Why don't you just shut up and die?" Nira says, moving at speeds in excess of Mach 2 towards Kayaba, attempting to strike him with her left sword [Matterious], only for him to _parry_ with his off hand sword, which his shield had turned into in that tiny fraction of a second _somehow_.

 _I took less than .03 seconds to cross the distance **[20 meters at Mach 2 (~660 m/s)]** , how the hell did he react in time? _Nira wonders as she pushes her [Unique Skill]'s ability to accelerate her consciousness to its limits, slowing the world down as she twists out of the way of a counterattack strike.

"What's the point of a 'unique' skill if it isn't unique?" Nira asks as she throws herself back, landing next to the rest of the 'raid' party, less than half a second having passed since she moved.

Despite parrying the strike, the sheer power had still dealt some damage to Kayaba.

"His reaction time is insane, he's probably using a copy of my [Unique Skill]," Nira says.

"How about you don't try to fight the final boss alone," Kirito says.

"I know," Nira says.

"I guess the rest of the raid group gets to watch," Akari points watch as the rest of the raid group files in around a thin crimson barrier which had appeared with a radius of roughly 30 meters.

"I'll lead, Kirito, Nira, you two flank me. Akari support fire, Asuna flank _him_ ," Heathcliff says and advances towards Kayaba.

Kayaba matches Heathcliff, switching back to longsword and shield.

They clash and as Nira tries to attack, a crimson barrier stops her blade.

The same happens for Kirito and Akari's arrows as they approach, along with Asuna's lightning-fast charge which came in sync with the other 3 attacks.

Even Akari's healing arrow gets stopped as she shoots it at Heathcliff. It gets bounced back straight to her, returning her HP.

"So what? We fight you one at a time and the rest of us don't get to interfere?" Nira asks, banging [Etherious], [Matterious]'s counter-part, against the barrier to see if its special effect of passing through a layer of defense would work on the barrier. It didn't. [Matterious]'s special effect was that it weighed a lot, but felt light for its wielder, giving it the mass of a greatsword or so and the maneuverability of a cross of a rapier and longsword.

Both were incredibly powerful [Legendary] and [Unique] items.

"Well screw you, you piece of shit!" she yells and strikes forward at her ridiculous speed, breaking through the crimson barrier with the potentially limitless power of [Incarnation], able to override even administrator abilities such as the crimson barrier.

Kayaba's face reflects some amount of surprise as he twists just in time to fail to block her strike with [Etherious], which passes through his sword with which he blocks and cuts through his armor, taking a chunk out of his HP bar.

A barrier raises in front of Heathcliff, making Nira's nominally impossible piercing of the barrier practically equivalent to a [Switch] with a little bit more surprise on Kayaba's part.

"Last time I checked, you couldn't play video games by whatever rules you choose," Kayaba says.

"Looks like you made a game where it _does_ work that way, so just shut up and _die_ ," she growls.

She then turns into nothing but a black blur as she moves around Kayaba with unreasonable speeds which should lead to her experiencing g-forces which would instantly kill her.

 **[Or rather, turn her into paste, because assuming she's moving around him at a speed of Mach 2 in a circle of radius 2 meters, she would be experiencing (Mach 2)^2/2 m=(4Mach^2)/2 m=2mach^2/m=23613 g (g is earth gravity) of centripetal acceleration, or if you assume she weighs 35 kilograms, that's roughly equivalent to the force exerted by an 850 metric ton weight in earth gravity. As I said, paste. As ridiculous as this number is, it's only half the acceleration of 50. cal sniper rifle's bullet in the barrel, and apparently only ~1.4 times more than a typical centrifuge (like for uranium processing)]**

Her Mach 2 motion created a massive, continuous sonic boom and an enormous amount of wind.

And then Kayaba was engulfed in a storm of blades. And somehow manage to mostly defend himself. Operative word, mostly.

As Kayaba's HP drains, he decides to do a Hail Mary move and simply charges through the circle of Nira. Of course, at over 50 rotations per second, Nira collides with him. They both go flying to the side, Nira losing her concentration and willpower maintained traction and trajectory.

Despite conservation of momentum saying that even assuming Kayaba weighed thrice as much as Nira and a completely inelastic collision, they would be moving at roughly half the speed of sound, a speed which would be more than enough to kill them both, if the collision itself didn't. Of course, such logic was faultily applied to a video game where things could be warped with nothing but willpower and expectations.

And thus, in true anime fashion and according to the expectations of the people watching, the two are moving at some measly tens of meters per second after the collision, and Nira twists in the air and skids to a halt, having lost a good chunk of her HP. Kayaba rolls along the ground and to his feet, the two of them ending up roughly 20 meters apart.

Nira groans from pain and checks her HP and sees it in the low yellow. She then collapses to a knee, considerably tired. Akari shoots her with several healing arrows before drinking a potion.

Kirito moves and attacks Kayaba before he can go after Nira.

Shortly after, Kayaba's first HP bar empties. It then shatters and crimson light flows up into a ruby above Kayaba, which then shoots at Nira, who dodges it, barely, and it sharply alters its trajectory towards Asuna, catching her by surprise and hitting her. Instead of doing HP damage, it inflicts a status effect depicted by a simplistic red ruby on a black background and the fragments of the shattered ruby which had stuck fuse together and flow over her, coating her in a coating of ruby which prevents her from moving.

Her HP remains at full, however.

"You bastard!" Kirito growls.

"She'll be freed if you win and killed if you lose," Kayaba says.

5 minutes later, Kirito and Heathcliff switching out with each other, plus a bit of Nira, deplete his second bar and a second crystal is released.

They all manage to avoid it, however, it simply keeps coming, even when smashed to pieces with a weapon.

All 4 remaining players back off and Akari says, "One of us needs to get hit by it. I'm the best choice since given our inability to even support each other, I can't do very much."

The other 3 agree, Nira somewhat reluctantly, and Akari allows the crystal to hit her.

* * *

As they got close to depleting his 3rd bar, Nira decided she pretty much understood the rules by which Kayaba was playing.

First, only one person gets to fight him at a time and that person can't be supported by others but can switch out.

Second, he will match skills (as game skills, not actual skill) and gear type (not exact copies of gear, just powerful weapons of similar type) (this seems to include mechanically but not visually his armor as well as his weapon) of the person he is fighting.

Third, whenever an HP bar is depleted, he will encase one player in ruby and make them unable to act. They are supposedly freed if he dies and killed if everybody else is also dead or encased.

Fourth, Kayaba had more HP, even per bar, than normal players, but not near as much as a normal floor boss.

Fifth, he had a lot of practice with the various weapons and also had some sort of system assistance.

Sixth, he allowed players to retreat, as long as there was a crystal chasing or somebody else took their place.

Seventh, he did not seem to use [Incarnation].

These meant that for the final bar, one of them would have to fight him one on one and it would be a fight weighted in his favor in terms of game mechanics, but still very much possible.

 _We can win._

As his next bar depletes, Kirito takes the crystal, after a semi-suicide charge at Kayaba which makes them both take a good amount of damage, since even if it was only one person at a time, a tank and a DPS would be better than two DPS.

While he matches with his own gear, its only effects seem to be increased [Sword Skill] power, as well as turning all [Sword Skills] white or crimson, making it harder to guess which he was using and it seemed difficult to break through his guard, though whether that was weapon or user it was hard to tell.

A short while of Nira switching back and forth with Heathcliff and Kayaba neared the end

"Switch," Heathcliff says and moves back, allowing Nira to take his place, clashing swords with Kayaba.

She was conserving her [Unique Skill] for when she needed it because it came with a large amount of mental fatigue and she had sufficient reaction time to parry or block most of Kayaba's strikes and was fast enough even without it for getting in some of her own. And at this point, she realized, getting hit was fine since she could switch out and heal. It seemed like the boss fight's main challenge would be the final bar, where she wouldn't have that advantage.

One advantage she did have was superior weapons because coping with [Matterious]'s force was difficult to do even for Kayaba and [Etherious] needed to be dodged or blocked with _both_ swords. Or blocked with one sword and mostly dodged, since in exchange with its powerful special effect, [Etherious] had rather low cutting power and so Nira needed a good hit to get through Kayaba's armor.

She parries a downwards strike from Kayaba with [Matterious], pushing Kayaba's sword far out and slashes with [Etherious]. Kayaba would be forced to either dodge and leave himself open to a strike from her other sword or block and rely on his armor to take the strike. Naturally, he goes for the latter, since [Etherious] without its special effect was far less likely to get through his armor or do a large amount of damage than a direct hit from [Matterious].

Nira's blow lands and cuts through the armor, doing enough damage to bring him to nearly his last bar.

"Switch."

Since she was dueling him one on one for the next phase and Heathcliff was taking the crystal it would make sense for her to rest while Heathcliff stalls a while before doing the last bit of damage (a small enough amount that a single heavy hit, basically no matter how well blocked, would do it).

"Ready?" Heathcliff asks a short while later.

"Yes," Nira says and Heathcliff charges forward, bashing with his shield and swinging with a heavy overhead strike. He—of course—gets punished for the over aggressive attack, however, the damage had been done and another crystal was released. Heathcliff takes it and leaves Nira alone against Heathcliff with one HP bar.

"I'm hardly surprised it came down to this," Kayaba says.

"Shut up and _die_ ," she growls.

She lowers into a stance.

"Make me," Kayaba says with a grin. As Nira dashes towards him, his shield does not turn into another sword but remains as it had been while fighting Heathcliff. And how it had been initially before she had attacked him at the start.

"No more matching, huh?" she says as she jumps back, altering her plans.

"I can hardly match you going all out if I copy your build," Kayaba says.

Nira leaps into the air, passing over Kayaba's head and landing on a pillar, kicking off to an adjacent one and repeating, going around the hexagon at ridiculous speed.

As time seems to slow for Nira she thinks, _4 times max? Yeah right, at the speed I'm moving the world should be a blur, even slowed down by a factor of 4._

She plunges towards Kayaba's right, swinging her swords in an X since behind is too obvious and right is farther from his shield.

He twists, his sword passing through [Etherious] as he puts his shield between the two swords and himself.

The X blow slams into the shield and he slides and leans back. Nira flips and plants her feet on the shield, kicking off, pushing Kayaba further off balance and flinging her back up towards the pillars, where she twists to land feet first and kicks off back towards Kayaba's back.

Kayaba follows his off balance lean backward into a flip, Nira's blows hitting his shield as he is in the air, allowing [Matterious]'s impact to fling him back and out of range of [Etherious]. He finishes his flip and lands feet first against a pillar, kicking off and back on level ground.

Both he and Nira stand on the floor once more and Kayaba's HP had taken a slight blow.

"Go Nira! Kill the bastard!" Klein cheers. The others soon follow him.

"With pleasure," Nira yells back.

She kicks off, slamming a lunging skill into Kayaba's shield with [Matterious], driving him backward into the pillar behind him and pushing his shield aside. She swings [Etherious] on his right shoulder with a [Vertical], where it passes through his sword and cuts into his armor and shoulder. He shows no reaction to the pain, if he even feels it, however his HP drops by 10% to around 85% and his counterattack comes slightly slower than his previous blows.

Nira moves her swords into a cross block just before the PMD kicks in and blocks the attack before flinging herself backward to avoid being hit with the edge of his shield, doing a one-handed back handspring as her motion makes her fall backward.

 _One direct hit with either sword should be able to deal massive damage and cripple him. Just one._

Nira practically teleports at Kayaba, striking over a dozen times over the span of a second and yet almost every one of them was somehow blocked or dodged, aside from a few grazes from [Etherious] which skimmed off his armor.

 _How is that even possible?_ she wonders as she backs off.

Kayaba gets into a lower stance behind his shield and it and his sword, pointed around the edge, glow crimson as he charges forward at a speed which would put Asuna to shame.

Nira sidesteps and spins to hit him from behind, however, his sword grazes her and he manages to move out of range before her sword hits.

She winces slightly.

 _Right. One direct slash from him and I'm as good as gone,_ Nira thinks. _And then Akari dies. And Kirito and Asuna and Heathcliff. And if the 5 of us couldn't beat him then nobody else will. Not for a long, long time. Not before their bodies in the real world die. In other words, the lives of every single one of the remaining 6k players rely on me winning. No pressure._

Nira sheathes [Matterious] and holds [Etherious] with two hands. She charges and activates a sword skill.

The sword skill is in a sense similar to [Vorpal Strike] in that it is one of the few skills which aren't possible to imitate without the skill.

The sword skill has 3 slashes inward in an equilateral triangle _at the same time_. Not extremely fast. The exact same time. If one of them is blocked, the others continue. 3 independent strikes in the same instant.

The skill, called [Turning Swallow Strike], is part of the [Blade Master] extra skill, obtained upon mastering 3 different bladed weapons skills. In Nira's case, it was [One-Handed Swords], [Rapiers], and [Daggers].

With [Etherious], which can't be completely blocked by the shield which could stop all three strikes, it was almost certain to hit, since Kayaba had his back to a pillar so he couldn't move back and the three strikes from top, bottom left, and bottom right, stopped him from going in any direction. He could block one or two with his sword, but not all three. His alternative was to charge and force her to do something else, which she was counting on.

Kayaba does just that, charging forward with his shield and slashing with his sword, not offering Nira much alternative to being hit should she continue the skill.

Aborting her skill, she draws and parries with [Matterious], [Etherious] passing through Kayaba's shield and stabbing him with a simple [Linear].

She yanks back her sword and falls to her back to avoid the horizontal sweep from Kayaba's sword, kicking off his feet to slide herself back and out from under his shield as he stabs down with its sharp edge. She rolls backward, pushing off in the middle with enough force to fling herself into the air and landing elegantly, swapping her two swords while in the air and flipping so Kayaba doesn't notice. The two looked identical, after all.

She smiles slightly as she looks at Kayaba's HP. 65%

She looks at her own HP, seeing it at around 75%. She hadn't used any of the healing crystals she had quickly available before because she had the alternative to use the health potions. That said, using one which could heal her to full from any HP when down only 25% was a pretty big waste. One view was that she couldn't take chances and the other was that wasting healing she could use was more dangerous than being down 25% of her HP.

When Kayaba charges, she is forced to make the latter choice.

As she jumps backward and realizes she had jumped too slowly and now that she in the air her options were very limited.

She twists herself as Kayaba nearly hits her, placing her hands on the top of the shield and flipping over him, however, he twists around and stabs at her.

Nira moves so that the sword pierces her side in a relatively non-lethal manner.

She slashes down with her right sword, which Kayaba believes to be [Etherious] so he moves to her left, keeping his shield between him and her left sword, the _actual_ [Etherious].

She stabs forward and he blocks with his shield, an expression of shock appearing on his face as it passes through and he barely moves in time to avoid the blow.

He cuts up with his sword in such a way that makes Nira let out a cry of pain even through [Battle Hardened] and flings her 15 or so meters into a pillar.

Her HP drains to the red and doesn't stop. It reaches 0.

Her body blurs and glows like she's about to shatter and then... nothing... the light just vanishes.

"I'm not dying without **_taking you with me_** _ **!**_ " she growls, turning into a yell as she stands and raises [Matterious] in the initial position of [Vorpal Strike].

What follows, however, can hardly be classified as a [Vorpal Strike]. As she pushes herself to and past every limit, the total speed of the spear of crimson light comes to over 30 km/s, which is approximately how fast the Earth orbits the Sun. And its reach goes out over 60 meters, plowing through indestructible objects as if they weren't there and out of Aincrad, the line of crimson light from her sword shattering Kayaba's shield, piercing through his heart and shredding his entire body, shredding the [Immortal Object] pillar behind him, shattering the indestructible barrier keeping the rest of the Clearers from helping (thankfully where there was nobody), and taking a chunk out of the [Immortal Object] white wall of the room and out of Aincrad, fading a little ways outside.

It crosses the 15 m distance between Nira and Kayaba in half a millisecond, not leaving even him time to react. The degree of overkill is so high that his HP doesn't slowly decrease as it usually does, since it decreases at a rate proportional to damage done (in other words, it always takes the same amount of time), but instead drops to 0 almost instantly. He shatters.

The sound created was deafening and likely heard several floors down.

Nira drops her swords and walks, clumsily and practically to where Akari was de-rubifying.

She wraps her arms around Akari and whispers, "Bye."

Nira shatters as Akari's arms wrap around her, leaving Akari clutching the floating polygons before collapsing to the ground on her hands and knees.

"Nira... why..."

 **"On January 7th, 2025, at 7:12 pm, the game has been cleared. Player HP is now fixed. Enemies dismissed. All living players will be logged out,"** a system alert plays before repeating a short while later.

Over the entire Aincrad, everybody except a select few on the 100th floor celebrated.

* * *

Nira closes her eyes as the world shatters for her, though she knows to everybody else it was she who shattered, and awaits her death, wondering if it would be painful.

She waits 10 seconds, which is what she expects it to take. Nothing happens.

She waits 30 seconds. Nothing happens.

After a minute, she considers that she may be already dead and opens her eyes.

What she sees is Aincrad floating beneath her and to the side, the sunset in the distance.

She watches the beautiful sight and hoping that the fact she wasn't dead yet meant she wouldn't die.

"Congratulations on clearing the game," a voice she recognizes as Kayaba's comes behind her.

Somehow, she doesn't feel the urge to grab him and throw him off the invisible platform they were standing on.

Instead, she simply responds, "Kayaba."

"Yes."

"Why am I here?"

"Let's call it a [Last Attack Bonus] if you will. Your reward for beating the game."

"Reward?"

"You'll be logged out in a few minutes. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions."

"Why," she asks, not looking up at him.

"What were you willing to kill 4000 people and damage the lives of so many other people for?"

"Ever since I was young, I've dreamed of this. A floating fortress of steel. When I created the NerveGear, I realized that I could make it a reality. And I did. But what is this world needed inhabitants?"

"And players wasn't good enough?"

"Players are not normally inhabitants. They do not live there. They have a relatively small stake in what happens there."

"And for that, you killed 4000 people?"

"Yes."

Nira sighs, wondering why she _still_ didn't feel like murdering him again.

"Why don't I want to kill you?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," Kayaba answers.

She sighs again.

"Okay then. How is it possible for me to break the rules with determination? If the NerveGear _really_ worked like you claim, there's no way that would possible, deliberately or otherwise. There are also no polygons and everything feels real," Nira says.

"Art of Combat Online is somewhat like a dream shared by all the players. A lucid dream. As you guessed, the NerveGear only worked how I claimed it does in the early prototypes. I discovered something entirely different and far more powerful. A way for the device to interface directly with the soul."

"Soul?"

"In a sense. It is too complicated to explained in the time we have, so we'll just skip over that for now. You can read what I've written about it and never published if you're interested. That aside, ACO and the NerveGears both have two systems. The 'dummy' system which works how all my papers say. And the 'black box' system. What _really_ runs this world and interacts. The true ACO runs on a special quantum computer as well as the minds of the players. This is why you can warp reality with your mind. If you will it to work some way with more power than the collective passive belief it shouldn't work that way, it will.

This quantum computer is also responsible for interfacing with the 'dummy' server and for doing things like sword skills," Kayaba says.

 _What did I expect, asking a technical question from this super-genius?_ Nira wonders as she only very approximately understands what he says.

"This is also how your [Unique Skill] works. It accelerates your soul. That said... you exceeded the coded limits of the skill of 4 times by far. The skill was also never supposed to allow you to _move_ much faster, only allow you to process and react faster. And, I also took it away at, yet despite that, you were able to use it, as I semi-expected. Though whether that is due to you forcing the system to do it for you even without the skill or due to you somehow doing it naturally, I don't know."

"The game was never supposed to have people to move at Mach speed. Yet you did that freely, and even destroyed [Immortal Objects]."

"When we collided, that was dictated by the expectation from watching too much anime of the people watching us fight, they actively expected us to collide and move at some reasonable speed."

"Alright. On a somewhat different track, why no magic?" Nira asks.

"Because that would be a waste of the NerveGear's capability. You give people magic and the magic is no different from how it is in a normal game. When you fight with a sword, you have to move your own body and be skilled about it."

"What about bows? They require aiming, sure, they seem to be a different level from melee weapons," Nira says.

"Originally, this game was going to be Sword Art Online. I didn't plan to include any ranged capabilities aside from throwing weapons and a couple special weapons, none of which would be effective at doing large amounts of damage, but which would instead have been used in stunning enemies or hitting extremely weak points. I added bows for the people too afraid to fight up close since it would hardly be interesting if most of the people just hid in houses, and because it considerably opened up what I could do with enemies."

"There was an annoying issue with that, though. If you haven't noticed, all but a few extremely high-end skills for melee weapons are reproducible without the skill. However, with a bow, there are only two things you can really change, accuracy and fire rate. I can add skills for auto finishing drawing to increase the latter and add aiming system assist for the former, but after that, there isn't anything you can with bows that still adheres to the same pattern of 'technically possible without the skill' as with the melee skills. However, without any skills, bows would be so severely underpowered that having them at all would be pointless. So I reluctantly added skills which could be done with preparation theoretically, like explosive arrows and the like, and then only at high tiers did I add skills like power shots, homing, rebound, scatter, and the like. That's how the game arrived at its current state when it comes to skills."

"Why tell me so much?"

"Why not? It's served its purpose. If you went around telling everyone and even if people believed you, it wouldn't be an issue. And I find it enjoyable to talk about my research with someone interested."

"It looks like our time for the moment is up, however. If you are interested in reading the papers and research notes, go to my website and log in with my account, username Akihiko and password ahKs23I092dnkfSIODH839d. Goodbye, for now," Kayaba says.

Kayaba fades and Nira watches as Aincrad crumbles and awaits being logged out. She catches a glimpse of the [Black Swords]' guild hall/place of residence as it falls away.

Finally, as the destruction reaches the top and the 100th floor falls apart and out of the sky, Nira lies down on her back so that there wouldn't be any change in orientation when she was logged out.

She closes her eyes and waits. A moment of weightlessness with no feeling and then she feels infinitely heavier than she had in her life before. She feels something on her head as well and guesses that it is the NerveGear.

She slowly opens her eyes. She sees the green visor of the NerveGear above her head and says, "Really back, huh?" Or rather, tries, since her mouth was too dry to make any sort of proper sounds and it instead just hurts her throat.

With extreme difficulty, she slowly lifts her arms, feeling the IV in her left arm and being careful. She slowly and with difficulty—nothing emotional or whatever just physical difficulty—removes the device from her head and rolls it to the side.

She then lies back and relaxes her arms and neck which hurt slightly from the strain of basically nothing.

 _Guess I'll wait for a few minutes for somebody to come before I try to call somebody or something,_ she thinks.

A minute or so later, a nurse walks in.

She didn't seem surprised by Nira being awake, which made sense since the hospital probably had at least a few other ACO players who would have already woken up.

Nira tries to say 'water' but fails miserably and just hurts her throat. Either the nurse guessed what she was saying or just decided that she would have a parched throat because she says, "I'll be right back with some water for you."

Nira nods faintly, difficult when lifting her head was a near impossible task, but it was easier than saying 'thank you'.

The nurse leaves the room and returns less than a minute later with a paper cup of water.

She walks over to Nira and sets the cup down on the table next to the bed before helping Nira into a sitting position against the wall and holding the cup to Nira's lips, slowly pouring the water into her mouth.

Even drinking was somewhat painful at first, but after she drank the cup she managed to say understandably, "Thank you."

"Would you like some more?" the nurse asks.

"Yes please," Nira says, after clearing her throat. She coughs slightly.

"Don't hurt yourself being polite," the nurse says with a smile and grabs the cup, leaving to get more water.

* * *

 **I'll probably have an epilogue of sorts for this arc as well before I end this.**

 **Anyway, sorry that this is crap.**


	14. Chapter 14: Epilogue-ish for Aincrad Arc

**So... I guess I'm writing this sooner than I expected.**

 **In other news (currently this is March 9th), I just happened to go to the Ordinal Scale Wikipedia article and see, '** **It was released in Japan, Southeast Asia, and Germany on February 18, 2017, in Mexico on March 4, 2017, and in the United States on March 9, 2017.'**

 **Well, would you look at that (I live in the US)?**

 **(March 12th) I was cutting a bun with a fucking table knife and I managed to cut myself. I feel accomplished. It's a pretty clean cut too.**

 **Me: Using a razor sharp knife or playing with a propane torch and red hot metal held in my bare hands? Not a single mark. Opening a door (yes opening, not closing (it was a sliding door and I got my finger in the gap between the door and the wall and the corner of the wall there was fairly sharp)) or using a table knife? _That_ is when I hurt myself.**

* * *

"Hello, Nira-kun, Akari-kun," the government somebody says after nodding to the nurse who leaves the room—one which was shared by both Nari and Aki since they managed to convince the hospital that since they weren't sick and just weak and would be stuck in bed, it would be good to have the company of each other. He sits down on a chair next to her bed.

"I am Kikuoka Seijirou of the [Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Virtual Reality World Division]."

 _Great. What does he want?_

"What do you want?" Nari asks bluntly.

"And also, our names are Kai Nari and Kirihura Aki, 'Nira' and 'Akari' are our online usernames. You don't go around referring to people by their usernames in the real world," she adds.

"Right. Kai-kun, Kirihura-kun. I'd like a few questions about what happened in ACO," he says.

"And if we don't want to answer?" Nari asks.

Kikuoka groans.

"I'll answer your questions if you do three things for us," Nari says.

"What?"

"First, we want to keep our NerveGears," Nari says.

Kikuoka sighs. "We can arrange that."

"Second, I want the real names and contact information of a list of people from their usernames in ACO," Nari says.

"Fine."

"And third, I want access to the ACO server, source code, resources, and backups," Nari says.

"..."

"What do you plan to do with that?" Kikuoka asks.

"I'm curious about a few... dozen... things," Nari says. _And mostly I want the Cardinal System._

"Fine. I'll see what I can do," he says.

He pulls out a notebook.

"Can you write the usernames of the people whose information you want in here?" he asks.

"I can try," Nari says, taking the notebook and pen with some difficulty.

After a few tries at writing in neat letters, she gives up and writes in a large font which ends up legible despite the shakiness.

"Thank you for your 'cooperation'," Kikuoka says as he leaves, muttering under his breath and leaving behind a somewhat smiling Nari.

"Well, so much for getting that being difficult," Aki, who had stayed quiet while Nari had forced stuff out of the government official, says.

"What a pushover," Nari says.

"Well, he doesn't stand to lose much from giving you what you want."

"That's true," Nari agrees.

There's a knock on the door.

"Who's there?" Nari calls out.

"It's us," comes the familiar voice of Hina.

Nari finds the button on the side of the bed which unlocks the door and they come in.

"How are you two feeling? Also, who was the person just leaving?" Sari asks.

"I'm feeling just as weak as yesterday and considerably happier than 10 minutes ago," Nari says.

"Same," Aki says.

"And the person was some government agent who wanted to ask some questions about ACO. In return he's agreed to a do a few things for us, hence the being happier part," Aki says.

"Oh. Anyway, we brought some edible food," Sari says.

"Thanks," Nari says, taking the soup with some difficulty.

It hurt for Sari. Seeing Nari and Aki like they were, stuck in bed and too weak to do basically anything instead of being active and full of energy, but it wasn't nearly as bad as seeing them just lying on that bed with those damned helmets on their heads, unconscious and trapped in another world they may never wake up from.

* * *

Roughly a month later, Aki and Nari—who could probably have finished rehabilitation earlier but stayed to keep Aki company—were checked out of the hospital, though they still needed crutches to walk.

"Freedom! At last!" Nari says in an exaggerated manner as the 4 leave the building.

"Can we eat dinner at a restaurant today?" Nari asks.

"It's 9 am and you're thinking about dinner?" Hina asks with a chuckle.

"I'm hungry."

"That would be called 'breakfast' if we had food right now."

" _I know that_ , but food was already on my mind so I happened to think about dinner," Nari defends herself.

"Whatever you say. Anyway, we can have dinner wherever you two want, as long as it doesn't require a reservation made last month or something," Hina says.

"Anywhere particular in mind?" Sari asks.

"Hmm... nope!" Nari says.

She facepalms and sighs, shaking her head slightly in amusement with her hand still pressed to her forehead.

"Come on, get in the car you two," she says.

* * *

"Anything you want to do now that you're out?"

"I was thinking maybe going back to the kendo dojo. See if anybody I know is still there. See Shiriu-senpai. And so I can remember what sword fighting looks like in the real world where nobody can move supersonic and jump 10 meters into the air," Nari says.

"Nari, the whole supersonic thing, and generally ignoring physics, is just you."

"And?"

"Should we go straight there? Anything you want to do, Aki?" Sari, who was driving asks.

"Breakfast first," Nari reminds.

* * *

"Nari-chan!" the daughter of the dojo's owner—and one of the main teachers, well as the person who practically ran the place—calls out as she runs over to the 4 of them as they enter, hugging her. The girl would be turning 18 in a couple days, making her roughly 8 months older than Aki.

"Don't break me!" Nari cries out as she struggles out of Shiriu Mai's grip.

"Sorry," she says sheepishly, leaning down and picking up Nari's dropped crutch and handing it to her.

"It's been a while Mai-senpai," Nari says.

"I heard you get trapped in that whole ACO thing. Glad to see you're alright, though, judging by the crutch, I doubt you've come to spar," she says.

"Yeah, just wanted to watch," Nari confirms.

"Maybe you could help out a bit. A few of them," she gestures to the students sparring in the dojo, "seriously need it."

"I guess. Though I can't demonstrate really. Aside from the fact that I have trouble even walking more than a short distance, I've gotten like 25 centimeters taller since the last time I touched a sword and it's been over two years since I've touched a shinai."

Mai, finally noticing the other 3 people says, "Hello!"

"Anybody from still here from when I came here before?" Nari asks as she sits on one of the seats available for watching.

"A few people still come, but nobody's here at the moment. In fact, nobody any good is here at the moment, really."

"How long do you plan to stay here?" Hina asks.

"I dunno. An hour or so I guess."

"We'll probably leave you be for now so as to not make things awkward. Text us when you want us to pick you guys up," Hina says.

"Alright. Bye!" Nari says.

"Bye," Aki says.

"Well, I've got to get back to my students, but feel free to call me over if you need anything!" Mai says and runs off.

* * *

Nari facepalms and sighs as yet another of the students makes a stupid mistake, leaving an enormous opening _and_ their opponent fails to capitalize.

"Even I can see all those mistakes..." Aki says.

"I wanna spar with someone," Nari says, stretching.

"You can't walk more than like 50 meters without resting or using a crutch."

"Plenty enough to beat these people. Especially if I do you-know-what," Nari says.

"Sure, but where would the fun in fighting them be?"

"I suppose I'll just fight Mai-senpai then."

"Can you beat her right now?"

"Probably... not," Nari says.

"But it can't hurt to try," she adds with a smile.

"Actually, it very much can. Starting from the fact that losing involves being hit with a bamboo stick and ending with the fact that you could hurt your muscles, especially if you do _that_ ," Aki says.

"I'll be fine," Nari says.

"Whatever you say, just don't come crying to me if you get hurt."

"I don't cry from pain. I just swear and get angry," Nari says.

"True. But I didn't mean it literally."

"Mai-senpai!" Nari calls out when Mai finishes with helping the person she was helping.

"Yeah?" Mai asks as she walks over.

"Let's spar."

"You sure? You don't look like you're in great shape... then again, it might not be enough of a handicap against you."

"I'm sure. I can handle getting a little beat up."

"Alright then, go get yourself into some gear and let's spar."

Nari gets up and picks out a set of gear her old size, realizing quickly that it was far too small now and taking a few tries to get a set her size.

She gets into it with a little trouble and grabs two swords.

"Two swords? Since when do you use two swords?" Mai questions.

"Since a little more than 2.5 years ago. Anyway, you ready?" Nari says.

"I'm ready. Be careful and don't hurt yourself or something," Mai says.

Both of them get in their stances and Mai says, "Ready... go!"

She charges forward with an overhead strike.

To Nari the strike is so slow it might as well be moving through honey, even without accelerating her consciousness, since she was used to the speeds of ACO avatars and enemies. That said, her own movements were equally slow—if not more so—so parrying the strike was not trivial. The loud clack attracts the attention of the various people in the dojo.

That said, she was able to see through Mai's motions and combined with effectively slowing time when she was unable to keep up, she was able to dance around and deflect Mai's attacks with minimal movement and effort until Mai slips and leaves an opening Nari takes, winning the match and moving at a speed which she regrets several seconds later.

Their audience, Aki included, clap.

"Fuck fuck," she mutters repeatedly as she clutches her side, where she had hurt herself when she twisted to increase the speed of the blow.

"Are you alright?" Mai asks.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I shoulda seen that coming. Or rather, I sorta did."

"Since when is your reaction time that quick?" Mai asks, "Fighting you felt like you were seeing things in slow motion. You reacted as perfectly as possible with your physical limitations and danced around my attacks."

"Since I started fighting at literally supersonic speeds," Nari says. She sheathes her swords on her back, only to realize that she didn't have any sheaths there.

She chuckles awkwardly and Mai smiles.

"I'd like to see that. I can't imagine what could react fast enough to fight you like that, though."

"Computer programs, mostly," Nari says.

"Even if it's you, it's still embarrassing to lose to someone who can barely walk," Mai says.

"I think I need to sit down," Nari says, taking off the kendo gear and attempting to throw it back in its place, failing miserably as it slips out of her weak grip and flies a short distance. She sighs and walking towards it before Mai says, "I'll get it, just sit down."

Nari is about to protest but then says, "Fine."

"I hate being so helpless," she mutters.

"And I hate being beaten by a girl who considers herself helpless, and probably is, at least compared to her full potential," Mai calls.

* * *

A little while later Aki and Nari said goodbye to Mai as Sari and Hina came to pick them up.

"Have fun?"

"Nari decided it would be a great idea to spar," Aki says.

"I never thought it was a good idea. I just wanted to do it anyway," Nari says.

"I'm not sure whether deliberately doing something stupid is better than doing something stupid without realizing it."

"I suppose it is since if you know it is stupid, you are consciously taking risks and if the risks were greater would likely not do the same," Sari says.

"Yeah... I don't think greater risks have ever stopped her before," Aki says.

"I totally do take into account risks!" Nari says.

"Like that time you nearly died to save an idiot who how got himself into trouble in the first place because he was greedy and stupid. Or that time you killed a floor boss alone. Or that other time you killed a floor boss with me for support and nothing else. Or that one time you killed a floor boss with just Kirito's help. Or all those other times you acted as one-girl-army. Or that one time you decided to a fight a mass-murder perfectly willing to kill you on your own. Or that one time you let Kayaba actually kill you to beat him."

"Hey! That last one wasn't something I did deliberately! I didn't _let_ Kayaba kill me, he was just very good at his own game," Nari protests.

"Well that's a relief," Aki says sarcastically, "At least you have enough self-preservation to not let someone kill you."

"If I could have planned what I did, I would have just done it from the start. It's not like I took him by surprise. If you recall, my attack went straight through his shield, unimpeded."

"And several [Immortal Objects] after that," Aki says dryly.

"And the second-to-last one wasn't even stupid. He didn't have a chance against me," Nari adds.

"Which is why he nearly cut your head off."

"He missed me by _at least_ half a second."

"Nari," Hina says in a cool tone.

"Yes?" Nari says in a small voice and shivers, cowering in the corner of the backseat of the sedan.

"Do you think before you act?"

"Mostly. Not when somebody will die if I take the time to think," Nari says.

Hina sighs.

"Well, telling you to act differently is pointless now since you're probably, and hopefully, not going to end up in a situation like that again."

"Anyway. I'm alive. Can we change the subject."

* * *

Roughly a week later, when everybody else had gotten out of rehab, the [Black Swords], Heathcliff, Nari, and Aki all met at the Dicey Cafe. The [Black Swords] minus Asuna.

As such Kazuto was not particularly celebratory, though he does smile at the pair. It was the first time they were meeting in the real world and he says, "You're taller," to Nari.

"I noticed," she says sarcastically.

"Really helped with being able to walk again. Not only did I not have muscles, but I'd also grown 25 centimeters in the span of roughly 3 seconds from my perspective," she adds. She chuckles.

"What?"

"I was just thinking about how during the beta I had the same problem in reverse since I made my avatar taller than my real self. I'd also trip for a few minutes after logging in or out," Nari says.

"Oh."

"Hey Akari- sorry, Aki-chan, right?" Kazuto says.

"And sorry in advance for all the times I will inevitably refer to you by your usernames," he adds.

"That'll probably go both ways."

"I'm sure it will."

"So... any ideas on what's going on with the still trapped players?" Nari asks.

"Sadly, no. I was going to ask you if you thought it might be Kayaba, though it doesn't seem like the kind of thing he'd do from my limited interaction with him, I figured you'd have a better idea since you got to talk to him."

"Doesn't seem like what he'd do. I'm reasonably sure that it was never his intention to keep the players trapped forever and that he intended to release everyone once the game was cleared."

"Did he give any hints? Anything?"

"I don't think so. Unless it's somewhere in his research notes or unpublished papers which I have yet to read. As much as I doubt that, it is possible. Or..."

"What?"

"I received a message from some unknown phone number a little after I woke up. It was a mess of characters and I decided that it was probably from sort of spam. Thinking about it, though, it could also be a puzzle."

She gets out her phone and copies the message to Kazuto.

"Feel free to take a look at it. I think I will too. Any ideas what it is, though?"

"Not immediately, I'd need to perform some analysis to figure it out. Potential usefulness aside, this looks like it could be fun. It's probably a puzzle since nobody sends spam like this. I remember solving puzzles like this when I was younger. Puzzles with no obvious rules where the even what the puzzle was asking for was part of the puzzle."

"Alternatively, someone could have sent this to the wrong number and it was encrypted with something like a 1-time-pad, in which case breaking it would be literally impossible and completely pointless."

"You two shouldn't get caught up in my gloominess, go celebrate."

"We want to free Asuna, and the rest of the 300 players, too," Nari says.

"And being gloomy with me during the party helps with that how?" Kazuto asks.

"Oh! I have an idea," Nari says.

"What?"

"I'll ask Agent Kikuoka about the phone number. If it turns out to be Kayaba's, for example, we'll know it's worth solving the puzzle."

"Go ahead, though I doubt he'll just do that for you."

"I think I can encourage him," she says with a smile and takes out her phone again.

"What? Right now?" Aki asks.

"Why not?"

"We're at a celebration, not a place where you call bland government agents."

"It'll be quick," she says, already going to contacts and calling the man.

 _"This is Agent Kikuoka of the [Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Virtual Reality World Division],"_ comes a voice across the phone as he shortly picks up.

"Hey. It's Nira," Nari says.

 _"What are you calling for?"_ he asks.

"Could you do me a favor?"

 _"What do you want?"_ he asks with a sigh.

"I have a phone number which I want to know the owner of," she says.

 _"And why would I do that?"_

"It may seriously help with getting the 300 still-trapped players," Nari says with a smirk.

 _"..."_

"Well?"

 _"Fine. What's the phone number?"_

Nari gives him the phone number and hangs up.

"I suppose that counts as it going well."

* * *

 **And that ends this. The rest will be in the next arc if there ever is one.**

 **Thanks for reading this atrocious story and please review!**


End file.
